by Sam Sisavath
When they were sure the ghouls had finally retreated, they slid down to the floor and allowed themselves a moment to rest. Will loosened his grip on the flesh- and blood-encrusted cross. He could barely see the silver or bronze anymore. He wiped the clumps off by scraping it against the hard carpet. What would their owners think if they knew what he and Danny were doing with their religious symbols? He imagined screaming, shouts of blasphemy being possibilities.
“What are they doing?” Danny asked from across the room.
“I think they’re retreating.”
“Fucking A.”
They were both covered in blood and what smelled like pus. Maybe it was something else the ghouls bled in lieu of blood. It wasn’t like he had time to sit down and examine it with a microscope. Survival had taken precedence over inventory, and eventually the smell had mostly faded and become inconsequential.
Mostly…
Will found the couch, not far from the door. He picked up one side and Danny hurried to help, stepping over dead bodies. Sounds of brittle bones cracking like kindling underneath boots echoed inside the room.
“Aw, man,” Danny said, “this isn’t right. Sorry, guys. My bad.”
“I don’t think they’ll mind.”
“It’s not about them, it’s about me. I can practically smell the nightmares after tonight, and they smell like rotting pus.”
“That’s cute. You think we’re going to live through tonight. Captain fucking Optimism.”
Danny grunted in reply.
They put the couch back in front of the hole where the door used to be, then stacked a dresser from the bedroom on top of it. That covered half of the door but left a gaping hole at the very top. That was fine. Climbing ghouls were easier to deal with than ones that walked unencumbered through the door.
He searched the room until he located Peeks’s body. The big man stood out from the smaller, twisted dead things scattered around him. Peeks, even dead, looked like a God among the emaciated forms.
Will and Danny crouched in front of Peeks and watched him in silence. The former SWAT man was propped up against the wall, his hands entwined in front of him as if he had died in the middle of prayer. He looked peaceful, and in some ways, Will felt relieved for him. Peeks had been in tremendous pain throughout the night.
“Maybe he’s just fucking around,” Danny said.
“I doubt that.”
“He wasn’t bad, for a fat fuck with tree trunks for legs.”
Will smiled. He knew Danny actually liked Peeks. They all did. Peeks was always good with his share of the breakfast in the mornings and the lunches in the afternoons. Will had met Peeks’s wife, Sharon, and their kids, Lisbeth and Marcus, a couple of times at birthday parties for the kids of guys on the team. He recalled Sharon. She was such a little thing, such a counterpoint to her husband. The kids, though, were wildcats. You could tell they were going to grow up to be miniature versions of their father.
“His wife—” Will started, but he didn’t finish because at that very second Peeks opened his eyes and lunged at him.
Will fell backward, the cross falling from his hand and the back of his head smashing down on the femur of a dead ghoul lying on the floor. Peeks’s huge size collapsed on top of him like some boulder come alive. It was all Will could do in the split second he had to get his hands underneath the dead man (?) to keep from being crushed by his huge weight.
He saw dark black pits where Peeks’s eyes used to be, and the suffocating aroma of rotting cabbage stung Will’s nostrils. He realized, with sudden clarity, that the putrid smell spewing out of every pore of Peeks’s body at the moment was the same prevalent stench that filled every inch of the Wilshire Apartments.
Peeks was grinning down at him. Will saw grotesque and damaged teeth. (Meth teeth.) It wasn’t Peeks. Not really. The man Will knew was dead. This thing on top of him, reaching for his throat with its malformed hands, was something else.
Something dead.
“Any time, man!” Will screamed.
Danny appeared behind Peeks and rammed the sharp end of his blood-encrusted cross into the back of Peeks’s head. The life—as damaged and perverted as it had become—in Peeks’s black eyes went out like extinguished candles, and the big body slumped over him, suddenly soft and pliant.
Will pushed what used to be Peeks off with some effort. Peeks collapsed on the floor and lay still. Danny leaned over the dead man (again?) and pulled his cross free with a dull sloshing sound that reminded Will of spilling beer.
“Fuck me,” Danny said.
Will pushed himself back up to his feet, light-headed and wobbly. The effort he had expended to keep Peeks from crushing him had sapped most of his strength. He hadn’t realized just how big Peeks really was until seconds ago.
“You good?” Danny asked.
“Not really, no.” He gathered his breath. “You took your sweet time.”
“I wanted to make sure Peeks was really dead.”
“He didn’t look dead to you?”
“You can’t be too sure,” Danny said. “Shoving a silver cross through the back of a man’s skull is serious business. And you’re welcome.”
Will smirked, and Danny grinned back.
He looked around and found his cross, picked it back up. “From now on, everyone gets a silver cross to the head, just to be safe.”
Danny crouched over Peeks’s still form. “What happened to him?”
“One of those things bit him on the fifteenth floor. Maybe that’s how you turn. They break skin, you die, and you become one of them.”
“You just making all that up?”
“Probably, yeah.”
“Good enough.” He wiped Peeks’s blood and sticky clumps of brain matter off the cross using Peeks’s remaining pant leg. “So what’s the lesson here? Don’t let them bite you? Or don’t let them bite you and don’t die?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Which part?”
“Both?”
“Good to know, good to know…”
*
Around midnight, they heard movement throughout the building and thought the ghouls might launch another attack, but it didn’t happen. Will and Danny crouched in the darkness, crosses in their fists, ears pressed against the walls and floors listening for noise. Any noise. Though the ghouls were quiet, they still made some noise, and against the stillness of the city outside, it was enough to travel through the floorboards.
But no further attack came.
Not at midnight. Or one in the morning.
Two in the morning came, and there was still no attack.
Instead, the lights outside died.
“Oh, great,” Danny said. He was guarding the window while Will kept watch over what was left of the door. “I think we just lost the lights.”
“You think?”
“I’m pretty sure we just lost the lights.”
“Your power of observation is stunning, Danny.”
“I know, but don’t tell anyone. I like playing the thickheaded Neanderthal.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
Will moved across the living room to the window as quietly as he could, stepping over bodies as he went. He did his best to move around them, but even using the flashlight and moonlight as guides, he still managed to step on a head, heard the crunching noise as the skull feebly caved in underneath the sole of his boot.
Are skulls supposed to be that weak?
He flattened his back against the wall across the window from Danny. He looked out, slightly stale night air rushing against his face. He thought he was prepared for what he would see, but he was wrong.
He stared into blackness.
Will had to strain to see by moonlight. The street lights had shut down, and every window he could see for miles had gone dark. The Downtown skyscrapers in the distance, once visible beyond the 45 like towering Christmas trees, had been reduced to shadowy giants hovering over smaller buildings of concrete, glass, and
steel.
And he felt it in the air, along the streets, and even inside the room with Danny. It was unmistakable. A sensation he often had when they were stuck in combat back in Afghanistan and he knew, without the shadow of a doubt, that not everyone was going to make it out alive.
The very air around them vibrated dread. It coursed through every fiber of his being.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You tell me. One second there are lights, the next—poof. No lights.”
“Power grids must have gone down.”
“That supposed to happen?”
“If power grids could run themselves, there wouldn’t be jobs for Joe Electricity Employee. You know how many people the city employs just to keep the water and power going day-to-day?”
“I take it the answer is a lot.”
“A lot, yeah.”
“Awesome. What do I win, Charlie?”
“Peeks might have some power bars squirreled away in his pockets. Why don’t you check?”
“Bleh. I’ll pass.”
Will looked around, taking in as much as possible. There was enough moonlight to see parts of the streets below them, but just about everything else was a solid black canvas. The police lights that were spinning earlier in the night had stopped, and he couldn’t quite make out the vehicles parked along the streets anymore. Even the SWAT van had been swallowed up by the overwhelming nothingness.
“So,” Danny said. “The crosses.”
“What about the crosses?”
“We going with coincidence, then?”
“What else could it be?”
“I dunno…” Danny shrugged. “Something else?”
“Like what?”
“I dunno.”
“You know how I feel about…that.”
“Yeah, me too, but man, those things being there when we needed something that would kill these things.” He shook his head. “Makes you think.”
“Does it hurt?”
Danny grunted. “Bite me.”
Will grinned.
“You see it?” Danny asked.
“We back on the crosses again?”
“No. There.” Danny pointed across the street.
Will looked where he was pointing. Two of the creatures, crouched low to the ground, were watching them from an alleyway entrance between two apartment buildings. Even under the blanket of darkness, he could make out the unnerving obsidian eyes. They stared intensely back at them, unmoved by having been seen.
“They’ve been going up and down the street,” Danny said. “In the apartments, too. Coming and going like busy bees. They were out there even before the lights went out.”
Will nodded. It made sense. They had been fighting for countless hours inside the Wilshire Apartments. Except for when they had looked out the window, they had been occupied with trying to stay alive.
“How many did you count?” Will asked.
“Hundreds. I stopped counting after a while.”
“That’s not good.”
“Nope. I don’t think they’re the same ones that are in here with us, though. I think there’re a lot of them out there. And hey, I could be wrong—’cause it’s been known to happen—but I’m pretty sure there’s more and more of them every hour.”
“Like Peeks. They’re turning people.”
“That would certainly explain the increased numbers in such a short time.”
“Hunh.”
Danny gave him an annoyed look. “Really? I tell you there are armies of those things crawling around outside the building, waiting for us—assuming we do manage to get out of here in one piece—and all you have to say is ‘Hunh’?”
“I guess we’re screwed,” Will said.
“I would certainly not disagree with that particular assessment, no sirree. I do believe we are truly and royally screwed. So what’s the plan?”
“Plans A and B went up in ashes around midnight.”
“So where are we now?”
“Plan Z or thereabouts.”
“Well, that blows. Your Plan Zs are always shit.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“That’s true,” Danny said, “but in the overwhelming opinion of those who have been surveyed, they say your Plan Zs are always shit.”
CHAPTER 7
LARA
Despite her best efforts, Lara fell asleep around midnight and woke up later when a loud bang from somewhere along Holman Street reverberated all the way up to her apartment. To her disappointment, she opened her eyes to the same dark room she had gone to sleep in.
It’s still night…
She scrambled up from the floor where she had been lying crumpled up in a tight ball. She was too frightened to use the bed, too afraid of being seen from the window, even though she had closed the curtains tight and hadn’t turned any lights on. She had even closed her laptop, afraid the flickering screen might give her away.
She looked across the room to the digital alarm clock on the nightstand, but it was turned off. She stared at it for a moment, confused. She crawled toward her work desk and, still staying low to the floor, blindly groped the tabletop for her iPhone. She grasped the cold, small rectangle lump and then crawled back to her position between the bed and window.
Lara looked down at the iPhone and thumbed the “slide to unlock” animation, bringing up the password prompt. She entered the four numbers, but did it so quickly that she put in wrong numbers. Calming herself, she tried again and the iPhone opened up. She still had no bars, and the iPhone’s battery was at twenty-five percent. She had forgotten to charge it last night.
She tried calling 9-1-1 again, but the phone call never connected. She tried turning on the Safari browser, but it returned a “No Connection” message. She turned on Messaging, typed a quick sentence to Tracy, and tried sending it, but it refused to connect.
As she pondered her next move, the phone alerted her that she was down to twenty-four percent battery life.
Lara crawled back to the table, found the charger, and plugged it into the end of the iPhone. She waited to hear the quirky breep! sound as the phone began to charge, but there wasn’t one. She pulled the charger free and plugged it back in, but there was still no expected breep! sound.
Frustrated, she crawled over to the window and, making sure she was behind the wall, stood up and peered through an inch-long slit where the curtain opened slightly at the side. For a moment she thought it was just her vantage point, because the world looked nebulous through her miniscule one-inch view. But that wasn’t it.
The street lights had gone out, and every window she could see was pitch-black. She was momentarily baffled, then stunned when she couldn’t find a single working light anywhere in the neighborhood, no matter how far she looked.
This is impossible…
Desperate, she looked to the distance, toward Downtown, expecting to see lights along the skyscrapers. She could barely make out the dark outlines of what were supposed to be towering buildings. The only lights she could detect were the inert red and white lights along the highways, cars frozen in place. The city slumbered underneath some amorphous cloud, as if someone had thrown a blanket over it.
For a moment she childishly resolved not to go to sleep again, because it seemed that every time she closed her eyes, something bad happened outside.
Who needs sleep, anyway?
The quiet pulled at her and refused to let go. Where had everyone gone? There had to be others out there, maybe hiding in their apartments like her, waiting for daylight, for the police to show up, for anyone to show up. The military. The government. Unless it was happening in other cities, too. Around the whole country, maybe.
It had to be some kind of a terrorist attack. It was the only thing that made sense. Some religious fanatic with a grudge must have destroyed the power grid. Or some homegrown terrorist with an irrational fear of the current administration. There was an explanation here, somewhere. Cities didn’t just go dark. There were
people to take care of these things—city employees dedicated to keeping the lights on. There were infrastructures in place to make sure something like this didn’t happen, and the only way it could was if someone attacked it.
Of course it had to be terrorism.
It doesn’t explain the man with the spiked hair…
Or the creature perched over him…
Movement flickered suddenly in the corner of her eye. Lara pressed herself against the wall and stopped breathing completely, her eyes glued to the small one-inch view that was her only safe connection to the outside world.
She glimpsed a white shirt and black slacks in the moonlight as the figure—a man, not one of those things—darted between cars parked on the curb across the street from her apartment. He hid behind the bumper of a truck and looked around, scanning the streets for something.
Idiot, get out of the streets. Don’t you have any idea what’s out there?
She watched him jog off the street and toward one of the apartments to his right. He tried the door, found it locked, then moved on to the next apartment and repeated the process.
At least he was smart enough not to knock or make too much noise. If only the man with spiked hair had been that smart…
The man was on his third apartment door, and finding it locked, he quickly darted back into the street to hide, this time behind a blue Ford. He crouched against the bumper, and Lara saw him gathering his breath, looking around, growing desperate.
You should be scared…
He was almost directly in front of her now, and she could see him more clearly in the moonlight. He looked young, maybe early twenties, about her age. A plain black tie hung loosely from his neck. He looked left, then right, then left again.
He doesn’t know where to go. He’s stuck…
She thought about the man with the spiked hair, and before she realized it, she had knocked on her glass window—just one quick rasp with her knuckles, loud enough that she hoped he could hear.