by Sam Sisavath
Kate saw them—black figures darting in and out of the darkness, appearing for a split second underneath tall street lamps before disappearing again. She could make out more dark shapes running along the sidewalks, in the streets.
How many of them were there? Dozens? Hundreds?
“Kate.”
She spun around at the sound of his voice. She recognized it immediately. It was different than before—more hollow somehow—but she recognized it all the same.
Donald.
Or what used to be Donald. He looked old and wrinkled, his beautiful eyes now a lifeless black tint, as if there was something hidden behind them. Only she knew the truth. His tie hung indifferently around his neck, the broad chest gone, replaced by an empty pit that seemed to suck in his dress shirt. His slacks and socks looked ill-fitted—he had lost his shoes—and his hair had fallen away, leaving a pinkish bald spot that was being overwhelmed by dark black skin seemingly grafted over pale flesh.
“Kate,” the thing that used to be Donald said again.
They can talk, too.
She realized, with growing horror, that Donald was standing between her and the Mazda. He had moved so quietly that she hadn’t heard him at all until he had said her name. She didn’t have a weapon. Her purse was inside the Mazda, her keys in the ignition. All she had were her blouse, her skirt, and the expensive pair of Lanvin heels in her hands.
Donald walked toward her. He was impossibly quiet, bony fingers pulling at the tie around his neck as if he didn’t know what it was or why it was there. He pulled it free and let the satin fabric drop behind him. Then he started tearing at his shirt.
“Kate,” he said again.
She wondered if that was all he was capable of saying. Some primitive part of him that was still Donald, that still understood language, how to form words.
“Donald?” Maybe if she could get through to him…
“Kate,” he said again, and this time her name came out of his twisted, malformed mouth with obvious difficulty. “Kate…”
He pulled the shirt free, and the wind picked it up, carried it a few yards into the air before depositing it over the edge. His slacks hung from protruding hips and, as he moved closer still, Kate could see the jagged chunk in the side of his neck where Jack had bitten him. The wound had turned into a deep purple bruise, and thick, oozing black blood trickled out of it.
“Kate.” A croak, barely audible.
Behind her, Kate thought she heard gunshots and screaming. And somewhere farther away, what might have been an explosion, or possibly a car crash. Her mind was feverish, and getting more so as Donald got closer.
She willed herself to stand perfectly still. The instinct to run was strong, nagging at her, telling her to do it, run now before it’s too late. But she didn’t. She held her ground and watched, with growing horror, as the thing that used to be Donald moved silently, getting closer and closer with every second.
Donald seemed to be losing hair with every step. He was almost entirely bald, the pink skin all but turned black.
“Kate.” He reached out toward her with one bloody hand.
That’s when Kate struck.
She swung with her right hand and actually felt one of her stiletto heels go into Donald’s left temple. The blow staggered him, and Kate, holding onto her other heel, sprinted around him toward the Mazda.
The car looked so much farther away than she remembered. Had someone moved it?
Don’t look back, don’t look back, whatever you do!
But she did look back and saw Donald watching her, her heel sticking absurdly out of the side of his head like some bad attempt at comedy. Calmly, he reached up and took hold of the shoe and pulled it free.
Did he just smile at her? She couldn’t be sure because of the distance and the night sky and the fact that her mind was screaming at her. Run, stop looking back, just keep running!
Kate made it to the Mazda and threw herself inside. Slamming the door shut, locking it, jerking the gear into drive, and shoving her bare foot down on the gas pedal. For a second or two she fought for control of the car, the steering wheel fighting against her as if it had a mind of its own. She felt the car finally relenting and raced it back down the garage ramp, to the lower levels, to the wide-open space of the fifth floor, and saw the black skies disappearing behind her in the rearview mirror.
She watched, expecting Donald to appear, but he never did.
She drove, not knowing where she was going. The fourth floor passed by in a blur, and before she knew it she was back on the third.
She slowed down as she approached the same bloody puddle where Jack had feasted on Donald. She was driving much slower now, because she knew as soon as she made the turn she would be on the second floor, then it wouldn’t be long before she reached the first floor, and after that, the front gate…
Then she was back on the first floor, and once again faced with the exit. Except there were the exact same six cars parked between her and freedom. The same metal slab that would crumple her car like cheap eggrolls if she tried to ram it. For a brief moment, as she was coming down the ramp, Kate had convinced herself that the cars would be gone by the time she arrived, that someone or something would have removed them from her path as if by magic, or maybe divine intervention.
What was that saying soldiers have? “There are no atheists in foxholes.”
She felt like laughing, only it wouldn’t have really been laughter that came out of her mouth. It would have been a mixture of crying and laughing and self-pity, mixed in with a little (or maybe a lot) of utter depression, because the cars were still there, as she knew they would be.
Order out of chaos. Find the order out of chaos…
She didn’t see any of the creatures around, and it wasn’t difficult to spot them in the bright lights of the parking garage. The Mercedes with the vanity plates (“S8UpFun”) was where she had last seen it, at the end of the six-car line parked in front of the exit gate. The longer she sat in the Mazda, the harder it was to avoid the stench of blood and death, even with the windows up.
Kate put the Mazda in park and closed her eyes. She kept them closed for a while, then opened them back up again and went through her options.
Yes, she had options. Some were better than others, that’s all.
And some were unavoidable…
Kate took a breath, reached down between her seat and the door, found the trunk lever, and pulled it. She felt rather than heard the trunk pop over the idling engine. She groped along the door and found the lock switch and pressed it. She heard, like a bolt of lightning, the sound of the lock snapping free, much louder than she had anticipated.
This is crazy; you’re going to die out there. You know that, right?
Kate opened the door and stepped outside, moving almost on pure adrenaline and instinct now. She instantly felt the rush of cold night air against her skin and for a second, just a second, she considered going back inside the car.
But she pushed on instead.
She hurried toward the trunk, sticking very close to the side of the Mazda, counting the steps that she would need to retrace when she invariably fled back to the safety of the vehicle. Though that opportunity was slipping away with every step she took, taking her farther and farther away from the door, from safety…
Prying her eyes away from the dead corners, she turned to face the open trunk, scanning for the familiar pocket along the left side, grabbed it and pulled it open and saw the long, metallic, L-shaped tire iron where she knew it would be. Kate yanked it loose and turned around, scanning the garage, keeping her eyes on the dark corners around her, listening for a noise, but realizing she could hardly hear anything over the loud thrumming in her chest.
She hurried back down the length of the Mazda, her left hand gripping the cold, steel tire iron, the fingers of her right hand keeping contact with the heated exterior of the Mazda. She needed to know it was there, waiting for her if she needed it, right up to the very last sec
ond.
Then she was walking past the door and kept moving. And now she was walking faster, her bare feet scratching against the rough concrete that dug into her soles as if she was moving across broken glass.
She passed the Mazda and kept going.
The Mercedes with the vanity plate came next, and as she passed its opened driver’s side window, she couldn’t help herself and glanced in and saw a thick patch of blood drying on the driver’s seat. It was dark and glistened under the garage lights, and she knew that it was still very wet. There were no signs of the woman, though there were dozens of blonde hairs scattered along the seats and arm rest.
They lose their hair when they turn…
She reached the hood of a small Honda, the grill of the much bigger Mercedes buried in the Honda’s driver side door. Something shiny caught her eye. She turned and saw a small two-by-four inch color photo in a cheap frame dangling from the rearview mirror. A young boy and a woman smiled back at her. They looked happy, prompting Kate to wonder how they died, and if they were together when the end came.
The third car was a maroon Chevy, its front bumper pressed up against the much bigger back bumper of a Ford F-150 truck. The Ford looked undamaged, but the Chevy’s hood wasn’t so lucky—its grill had fallen free after the crash. Kate didn’t see blood inside the Chevy or the Ford. Had their owners managed to flee in time? How far could they have gotten on foot?
Next, she came upon the damaged front bumper of an aqua blue Prius, parked behind the last car in the jagged, undisciplined line—a big black Buick with its driver side window rolled down. There was blood on the front windshield of the Prius, in the center of a spider-webbed crack where the passenger would have been sitting about the same time the F-150 crashed into it from behind. The force of the impact would have been startling and deadly.
Kate was looking at the crack in the windshield when she felt the air around her bristle, and the hairs along the back of her neck stood up. She looked back and saw something land with a soft thap! against the hood of her Mazda.
It wasn’t Jack or Donald, or at least she didn’t think it was them. It was hard to tell now. She couldn’t even say if this one was a man or a woman, or maybe it was a child. It was small enough to be a child.
They lose their hair and they shrink…
But the longer she looked at the creature, perched on the hood of her Mazda, the more the picture filled in by itself. The dozen or so strands of blonde hair still clinging to the scalp, the circular, blood-red choker around its neck. Only the neck had shrunk so much that the choker now hung loosely by its strap, as if it was two sizes too big.
“S8UpFun.”
Kate turned and ran. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw it coming. It moved with balletic grace, leaping from the hood of her Mazda and landing on the trunk of the Mercedes, scrambling up to the roof, before leaping again onto the Honda. It looked so small and weak, but it moved so fast and with such ease that Kate found herself entranced by the sight, taken with the fluidity of this creature that was chasing her, that wanted to rip out her throat and drink down every last drop of blood inside her body.
She ran faster.
The guard booth, with its big, open window, came up in a rush. She reached inside, screaming at herself to ignore the blood splashed over the swivel chair and the desk nearby (with the half-eaten sandwich and toppled can of Monster energy drink, thick green liquid spread out all over the table), and smashed her palm down on the green button.
The metal gate began to move up—so slow, so damn slow—but Kate was already circling around the hood of the Buick, back toward the driver’s side door.
Then she felt the air moving again and looked up and saw the creature was almost on top of her, torpedoing right at her. Kate didn’t have time to think, didn’t play the scenario over in her head, she just acted. She swung the tire iron in a wide arc, heard the whistling of steel slicing cold night air, then suddenly smashing into the creature’s neck. The blow dislodged it from the air and sent it crashing into the side of the guard booth.
Kate staggered toward the Buick’s driver side, praying and hoping for the key to be there, be in the ignition, maybe on the driver’s seat, somewhere close by, so long as she didn’t have to waste precious seconds looking for it. Because she could already hear the creature getting up on the other side of the car—
Her heart leaped at the sight of the keys lying in a pool of red on the driver’s seat, each key sticky with someone’s blood. Old-fashioned keys, not a key fob. She grabbed them as she lunged inside the vehicle, the sickening, squishy sound of her skirt becoming slick with the congealed blood barely registering. She grabbed the door and pulled at it with all her might. The Buick was a big car with big doors, and pulling at the door was like closing the twin gates of some castle under siege.
It closed with a loud bang!, so loud that it made her jump.
Kate stabbed the key into the ignition, and the Buick’s engine fired up on the first try as the creature raised itself up from the ground and stood next to the passenger’s side window, looking in through the closed glass at her. There was a noticeable indentation along its neck where the tire iron had struck, and the creature’s head was tilted to one side in a comically grotesque image. The red choker had cracked, and pieces had fallen loose.
The creature scrambled onto the hood of the Buick as Kate grabbed the gear shift, pulled it into drive, and slammed her foot down on the gas pedal. The creature lurched as the car shot forward. It lost its balance, smashing its face into the windshield before Kate jammed her other foot down on the brake. The Buick screamed as it slid to a sudden stop and the creature was flung backward, landed in a ball of bones and flailing flesh on the street.
Then it slowly got back up.
Kate gunned the gas again and the big American car launched clumsily forward and the creature let out a loud shriek as it disappeared underneath the hood. Kate heard the thump-thwump! as the right front tire ran the creature over, and less than a second later, another thump-thwump! as the rear right tire ran it over as well.
Then Kate was out of the garage and on the street, and she turned right along Louisiana Street and kept going. She glanced up at the rearview mirror and saw the creature stumbling back up to its feet, looking after her, its head still impossibly angled to one side.
They won’t die. They just won’t die.
Kate was rolling up the window when she saw Bell Street coming up. She turned right, running a stop sign, wondering if there were any cops left out there to write her a ticket. She had never wanted a police ticket more in her life.
There were cars on the street, silent and still and driverless. She swerved around them, going much too fast, heard the tires squealing and the Buick’s grill delivering glancing blows off one of the vehicles, then another. She had to use both hands because turning the Buick was a monumental task. She didn’t know how anyone could drive such a monstrous car all day long. Her hands were already aching.
She saw the same cars and intersection pileups that she had seen from the fifth floor of the garage, but up close they looked more vicious. And the blood. There was blood everywhere underneath the bright street lamps.
The red Camaro flashed across her mind, and she pulled her foot off the gas with some effort, watching the speedometer drop from fifty to forty and then finally to thirty. She came to a red light, where a pileup had rendered the entire intersection impassable. Kate came to a near stop, but then panic overtook her and she made a hard U-turn, a difficult feat given the Buick’s size. She managed to scrape the sides of two more cars before she could finally turn all the way around.
She went back up Bell Street, in the direction she had come, never once allowing the Buick to stop completely.
She took her foot off the gas some more and brought the speed all the way down to twenty. Then did it again until she was going as slow as ten miles per hour. She kept her right foot firmly poised over the gas pedal, ready to crunch down any se
cond if needed. She prayed that she wouldn’t need to, because Kate wasn’t entirely sure the Buick could accelerate on a whim.
But there was no need to push the Buick. Although she could see them in the shadows, along the rooftops, and between the alleyways and sometimes inside the parked vehicles, they didn’t attack. They watched her instead, following her with black, unblinking eyes, waiting for an opportunity. Just waiting…
They were everywhere.
They were simply…everywhere.
She drove in silence, scanning the roads and sidewalks and buildings around her for signs of survivors. There had to be others. She had survived, and there was nothing special about her. She had no training, no weapons—unless you counted the tire iron or her high heels—and she had managed to live through the night. For now, anyway.
Look for order out of chaos. Look for order out of chaos…
She leaned forward in the big seat as she neared Smith Street, which ended Bell and forced her into a decision—left or right. I-45 was to her left, and turning right would only take her farther into the Downtown district.
Order out of chaos…
She listened to the soothing click-clack of the lights as they changed from yellow to red then to green and back to yellow again.
Lights. So many lights. That was all she heard. All she could hear.
The buildings were quiet, the streets lifeless around her.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, but at some point, and she didn’t know when exactly, she turned right and kept driving…
CHAPTER 5
LARA
She was dreaming, though she wasn’t entirely sure about what, when the pop-pop-pop sounds of gunshots intruded and she woke up with a head full of rocks.