by Sam Sisavath
Jack took a step forward, and Kate heard herself screaming as she scrambled up to her feet and staggered away. Donald—handsome, strapping Donald—slid off the support column and flopped like a great big bloody whale, the sound of his face hitting the floor making a sickening thwack that Kate didn’t think she would ever forget for the rest of her life. Blood poured out of Donald’s neck in thick rivulets.
Kate stared at the thick strands of blood, like fingers stretching across the concrete, hypnotized by the sight of so much dark red.
Jack, whose dark lifeless black eyes had zeroed in on her a few moments ago, now lost interest as he moved past her. She jumped away with a gasp, thinking he was coming after her, but he crouched next to Donald and began lapping the blood off the dirty floor.
Kate stared, sick down to the pits of her soul, and she thought she might vomit—throw up this afternoon’s sandwich and chips and Diet Coke. Somehow she held them back in her stomach. She didn’t know how, maybe it was the horror of the whole thing, maybe she was simply too stunned, too paralyzed by what she was seeing to even do something as simple as wretch.
Move! Move, you idiot, while he’s not paying attention to you. Move your stupid ass!
Kate turned and ran and almost tripped over her purse lying on the floor on its side. Before she knew what she was doing, she stumbled back for the purse (What are you doing, you idiot?) and reached for it on the floor, eyes focused on Jack the whole time.
He was crouched in the widening pool of Donald’s blood, his pale pink tongue—had it gotten longer, more reptilian?—slobbering up the redness flowing around him like a greedy child that couldn’t get enough. She was afraid he would notice her at any second, but he didn’t. She realized, with a mixture of relief and numbed horror, that he had simply lost complete interest in her, because there was just the blood now. Donald’s blood.
And so much of it… How can one man bleed so much?
Kate pried her eyes away from Jack’s ghoulish form, snatched up her purse, and turned and ran. Somewhere between Donald, Jack, and her car, her heels were no longer on her feet. They were in her hands, and she clutched them like weapons. She ran past a parked black Mercedes with shiny gleaming doors and windows, and Kate caught sight of her own reflection staring back at her for the briefest of seconds.
Her long dark mane, always immaculately positioned around her head to complement the shape of her face, looked wild and streamed behind her. Her mascara-smeared face contorted in anguish and fear, tears flowing down her cheeks in streams and destroying what was left of her make-up, though she didn’t remember actually crying. Her hands were covered in blood, as were the front of her blouse and parts of her skirt, and the image of Donald’s blood pouring out of his body kept flashing across her mind.
So much blood. Where did all the blood come from…?
CHAPTER 3
WILL
It took them four hours to fight their way back down to the tenth floor of the Wilshire Apartments, dragging a bloodied Peeks between them, and Danny was still making with the jokes.
“These two brothers are at home watching football one Sunday afternoon. As brothers are wont to do, they start arguing about whose wife is hotter. The first brother says, ‘Bullshit, you know my wife’s hotter. Admit it!’ But the second brother insists, ‘Are you kidding me? Have you seen my wife’s vagina? It’s gorgeous!’ The first brother considers that for a moment, then replies, ‘Hmm, on second thought, you’re right.’ They go back to watching football when an hour later, the second brother exclaims, ‘Hey, wait a minute, how do you know my wife’s vagina is prettier than yours?’”
“Fuck you,” Will said.
Danny laughed. “Come on, man, I got that one from Rob. You remember Rob? Big, fat guy from Pittsburgh?”
“One that got shot by a sniper while pissing at night in the yard? Hockey fan?”
“Yeah, him. I guess no one told him the Stan didn’t have hockey.”
“They have polo with goat heads.”
“Yeah, well, not the same thing, is it?”
“You two are fucked up,” Peeks said, looking up at them from the floor, where he was trying not to bleed to death.
“Everyone’s a critic,” Danny smirked.
Will glanced over at Peeks. The big man had seen better days; his right leg was busted, and he couldn’t use his left arm. He had told them around the fifteenth floor that he couldn’t feel anything past the elbow joint. That probably had a little something to do with the big gash along his forearm, where one of the ghouls had bit him.
It was impossible to tell what they used to be, so Will had started thinking of them simply as ghouls.
To keep him from bleeding to death, Will had cut off a piece of Peeks’s pant leg and wrapped it around the wound. Peeks’s left arm now hung from his shoulder like a piece of useless meat, and his right leg wasn’t any better. He could hobble, but not for more than a few minutes at a time. It made moving between floors a bitch. Of course they couldn’t leave him behind. Will had thought about it on the thirteenth floor, and he was sure Danny had too, but they had each come to the same conclusion: No one gets left behind. They couldn’t afford to, anyway.
Everyone else was dead.
After Marker, Jenkins, and Ross got dragged off kicking and screaming into the darkness, and while Will and Danny were busy pulling a bleeding Peeks out of Apartment 2025, Lambert and Hollins went into the apartment and never came back out.
And that’s when the ghouls started flooding out into the hallway. They came out in a tide, like an ocean of black death moving across the filthy carpeting.
Fast. Inhumanely fast.
The M4A1s had become useless at that point, even on full-auto, but habit kept Will and Danny from discarding them. Will wasn’t superstitious, but the rifle had served him well during his tours in Afghanistan, and only dead soldiers threw away good luck omens. Besides, Will reasoned that if push came to shove, the rifles made for effective blunting instruments. The telescopic stocks could absorb a lot of damage.
They were relying mostly on Peeks’s and Marker’s Remington shotguns now, and Peeks had the foresight—or dumb luck, depending on how you looked at it—to cram enough shells into his ammo pouches to take them all the way down to the tenth floor. The buckshot loads were a hell of a lot more effective than the 5.56mm bullets that the M4A1s fired, though they had the unfortunate side effect of creating the surreal sight of ghouls attacking with only half of their heads still intact, missing jaws, or gaping holes in chest cavities—the results of shotgun blasts at close range. Those nightmarish couldn’t-possibly-be-happening moments convinced Will he was dreaming it all.
Dream or not, Danny’s jokes were still terrible.
Once the shotgun shells ran out, it was a matter of finding apartments that could be defended with the M4A1s. The ghouls didn’t die if you shot them in the head, but it did seem to bother them. Like kicking sand in a cougar’s eyes, it really pissed him off and kept him from mauling you…for a while, anyway. If all else failed, they still had their Smith and Wesson combat knives.
He had managed to make contact with SWAT Command somewhere around the eighteenth floor. They had promised backup, but an hour later no one had shown up. His next five attempts to reach SWAT Command only got dead air.
Things went from bad to crap when they encountered ghouls coming from below them while they were in the stairwell between the thirteenth and twelfth floors. It seemed obvious now that the ghouls had been down there since Will and the others entered the building, waiting for the right moment to strike.
As he watched the creatures swarm up the stairs, Will had a hollow feeling in his gut. He knew why no SWAT backup had arrived—they had not gotten past the lobby. Or maybe the first floor. Or the second… How many of those things were down there waiting for them?
Twenty? Thirty? A hundred?
It looked like a forest of moving limbs and black eyes. Innumerable.
“Like an orgy no one bothe
red to invite me to,” Danny said between the twelfth and eleventh floor, looking down the stairwell at what was coming up at them.
“That happens a lot?” Will shouted back at him.
“Every now and then,” Danny said between shotgun blasts.
Each time one of Danny’s blasts hit a ghoul, it lost its footing and tumbled backward, smashing into the creatures behind it and carrying a tangle of limbs and pruned skin down with it. A second later they were back on their feet and clamoring up the stairs and over each other, gaping holes in sunken chests dripping thick, oozing black fluids that didn’t look like blood. But then what were they?
They eventually located an apartment on the tenth floor with a door that could be locked from the inside. They scrambled around in darkness as soon as they slammed the door shut. Every hallway they had encountered had been dark and dank, with blankets and paint and tape and God knows what else plastered over windows.
Forced darkness and the pervading stench of decay and lifelessness followed them all the way down from the debacle at Apartment 2025 like a rabid serpent.
We’re in a nest. Jesus Christ. We just stepped into a nest and didn’t even know it.
“Where the hell is SWAT?” Peeks shouted.
“SWAT’s gone,” Danny said matter-of-factly. “We’ll have better luck writing letters to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny for help.”
Will could hear the ghouls coming down the hallway outside the apartment door, the sound of ruined, scarred bare feet crunching slowly against filthy carpeting. The realization struck him that they were moving cautiously.
“You know that, right?” Danny said from across the door, his blue eyes intense in the darkness, the ghost of a grin on his lips. “There’s no one out there. We’re on our own, Kemosabe.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I once dated this chick who insisted on doggy style every single time.”
“This is fucking nuts!” Peeks shouted from behind them.
“Nah,” Danny said, “I like doggy style.”
*
Apartment 1009 had three sets of locks, but only one was where it was supposed to be. The doorknob was gone, leaving behind a hole, and the door chain was missing. But, for whatever reason, the deadbolt was still intact.
Will turned it now and heard the solid click as the lock tumbled into place. Just to be sure, they pushed an old couch the color of vomit green against the door, then stacked a three-legged table on top for extra weight. It wasn’t much of a barricade, but they found through trial and error in the last four hours that it didn’t take a lot to defend a door against the ghouls.
Whatever had turned them into those things that roamed the hallways, it hadn’t granted them any more strength than what they already had to begin with. They seemed to rely almost purely on an unrelenting primal drive and sheer numbers. To get through the door, they would have to break it down first. That wasn’t going to be easy, even with the building’s rotted wood.
Will leaned against the wall and waited for an attack that never came. He listened, but couldn’t hear the footsteps from earlier. He glanced across at Danny, who caught his gaze and shook his head.
“Why’d they stop?” Danny whispered. “They had us on the run, right? That wasn’t just my imagination? So why’d they stop now?”
Will didn’t have any answers. The same thoughts were running through his head. “I gotta check on something,” he said instead.
He slung his M4A1 and dug a small LED flashlight from one of his pouches. He flicked it on and walked across the room to the window. It was draped with an ugly blanket, and over it were slabs of wood that covered the entire rectangular frame, giving it the look of a framed wooden box.
He grabbed one of the boards by the ends and tried to pry it free. It budged, but not by much.
“That’s God telling you it’s time to work out more, spud,” Danny said from across the room.
Had there been boards on the windows of the other apartments? He chastised himself for not paying more attention to his surroundings. Of course, being hunted by creatures that couldn’t possibly exist, that couldn’t be killed even when you shot them in the head, had not been covered during his months in Ranger school.
Now, without the sounds of gunfire and the chaos of combat to overwhelm his senses, he collected the evidence before him.
What did he know so far? Not much. But there were some things that couldn’t be denied.
Nests on the top floor and on the bottom floor. A kill zone. They created a goddamn kill zone and we walked right into it.
But it was the covered windows that nagged at him.
Why?
Why go to the trouble? The building was already condemned. The only reason they had been called in was because drug activity was suspected. So why go to the effort of covering up all the windows so thoroughly?
He could still feel it, gnawing at the back of his brain. The very distinct feeling that this wasn’t something random they had stumbled into. This was planned.
So what the hell was “this”?
Good question…
He glanced back at Danny. “Anything?”
Danny hadn’t moved from his spot, his right ear still pressed against the wall. “It’s deader than a bad stand-up comedy routine out there.”
“Thoughts and observations? Guesstimates?”
“Maybe they found something better to do with their time? Chasing after a bunch of guys with shotguns is not my idea of fun.” He shrugged. “Or maybe they just gave up.”
“Captain Optimism,” Will smiled back at him.
“You know me, glass half full kind of guy.”
“Come here and see if you can open this window.”
“What’re you, my dad? Do this, go there, come here.”
“Get your ass over here, Mister Glass Half Full Dumbass.”
“Definitely sounded like my dad right there,” Danny said as he walked grudgingly over.
Will swept the flashlight across the apartment, over dirty walls, stained carpeting, and cracked ceiling. Apartment 1009 was like all the other apartments they had passed on their way down from the twentieth floor, evidence of its former occupants scattered haphazardly about. Discarded personal items hung on walls, sat on dust-covered tables, or were forgotten inside loose drawers. Furniture that was either too big to move or too damaged to bother took up space in living rooms.
Will’s flashlight located Peeks on the floor. His back was against the far wall, and he looked even worse than he did a few minutes ago, if that was possible.
“Hang in there, Peeks,” Will said.
Peeks blinked under the harsh LED light and nodded back. Or tried to, anyway.
Behind him, Danny had pried one of the boards free with a loud grunt. He dropped it to the floor. “One down, a dozen nasty ass more to go.”
“Keep at it, buckaroo,” Will said.
“I’ll buckaroo your ass.”
Will grinned, then headed into the kitchen.
He searched the drawers and counters and found two bags of old Ramen noodles. Both had been feasted on by rats, their contents digested over the years then spat back out as droppings spaced generously along the counters and floor. He stepped around them and located a can of tuna without a label underneath the sink, but left it where he found it. He was always hungry after a firefight, but he wasn’t that hungry.
He opened the pantry closet and skimmed over empty grocery bags on the shelves. Dust erupted from one when he touched it, and he avoided the rest. The flashlight’s bright LED ran over the tip of a shoebox on the very top shelf. It was near the back as if someone had quickly tried to stash it but didn’t push it back far enough. Will reached for it, his curiosity further raised when he felt how heavy the box was. It was much heavier than a shoebox should be.
“Find some food?” Danny asked from the living room.
“You don’t want to eat what I found.”
“Any SPAM? I like SPAM. The
y say SPAM lasts for decades.” He grunted, pulled another board free, and dropped it to the floor. “Two down, and still dozens more to go.”
“Keep at it, buckaroo.”
“Shaddup.”
Will put the shoebox on the counter, crushing rat droppings underneath, and flipped open the lid. The flashlight revealed old and yellowed crumpled-up newspapers. He knew that wasn’t all there was. The box was too heavy. He picked up one of the two bundles and was rewarded with the weight of an object wrapped in the center.
He unwrapped the newspaper and stared down at a cross. It was big and gaudy, and about a foot long, which was exactly the same length as the combat knife strapped to his hip. But the cross was thicker and heavier, the weight distributed evenly from top to bottom. The sides of the cross reflected back a dull silver surface under the LED light. It was the only thing in the entire place not covered in dust or dirt or grime.
Sterling silver.
Will wondered if the person who had stashed it had simply forgotten about it. What was that saying? “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”
The rest of the cross was bronze, and the combination of the two metals—the bronze inside, making up the bulk of the cross, and the silver at the edges—made for a unique look. Will changed his mind, and decided it was less gaudy and actually tasteful, maybe even a little bit elegant.
He ran his finger along the silver edge, reaching the bottom where the cross formed a half-star and ended in a sharp point. He jerked his hand back when the point broke through skin and a single drop of blood fell to the counter.
He sucked on the finger and took out the other newspaper bundle.
There was an identical cross inside.
A matching pair.
Will left the kitchen with the crosses in one hand. He shone the flashlight on Peeks’s face as he passed by. Peeks didn’t bother to blink against the brightness this time. He looked like a drowning man trying not to go to sleep.