Come Little Children

by Melhoff, D.

  A sudden whoosh of cold air blew the scorching heat away.

  Camilla coughed as she pulled herself over the lip of the smokestack. Shivers rippled up and down her body, and her skin felt molten hot and freezing cold at the same time. For a second she breathed in the fresh air and felt completely relieved, but the sensation did not last long.

  Someone was screaming.

  She wobbled off the chimney and slid across the snowy shingles toward a bright flare in the distance. The roof was steep and slippery, but there was no time to slow down. When she got to the eaves troughs, the rear courtyard came into view like a miniature battlefield laid out below.

  The flames bellowing off the giant tree illuminated over a dozen bodies scattered across the snow. Some were motionless, while others circled another figure—Peter—who had ditched his shotgun in exchange for two .22 Glocks. The bodies had the strength and agility Camilla recognized from the hospital and the Cory twins, and they used anything they could find to attack with: lawn ornaments, yard tools, flaming branches from the burning tree. Peter’s guns had them at a distance, but he must have been low on bullets because he was doing more pointing than shooting.

  Camilla wanted to jump down and help, but the ground was a forty-foot free fall away. Moreover, she still hadn’t caught Abigail, and if there was any chance her daughter was still in the house, she had to go for it—now or never.

  A loud CLANK echoed behind her. She ducked to her stomach and wormed her way to the top of the roof again, peeking over the other side of the house to see a mob of townspeople attempting to crash through the front gate. The iron rocked violently, then another CLANK burst as someone’s shovel came down and broke the lock on the chain links. Moira flooded in first with Maddock and Brutus right behind her, and in their wake were at least a hundred Nolaners, all of whom were crying murder as they spilled onto the grounds.

  Camilla looked behind her, then in front again. On one side, the undead horde had Peter up against the porch, and on the other, the mob was surging forward with rifles and hatchets and war cries. The two of them were caught between pincers, and it finally hit her that they would never make it out alive. They couldn’t win; they couldn’t do anything except run the clock.

  There was a dormer—a semicircular window that rose up from the shingles—at the front of the roof. She shimmied toward it, aware that if anyone spotted her, she would be shot down like a duck in hunting season. She made it all the way over when the whole mob suddenly went quiet.

  No! She cringed. They’re staring straight at me. Here come the bullets…

  But the Nolaners weren’t staring at her. They were frozen halfway across the yard, looking up at Jasper’s decapitated head on top of the fountain. Suddenly, they didn’t seem so eager to enter the house.

  “Keep moving!” Moira hollered. “There’s three of them and a hundred of us!”

  The Nolaners weren’t reassured. While they continued staring at the severed head, Camilla slipped around the dormer and pushed firmly on the sill, sneaking inside with barely a peep.

  She was standing in the attic now. The air was as musty as it had been when Peter proposed to her in this same spot more than eight years ago, and she doubted that anyone else had come up since then. But as she rounded a pile of antique trunks, her hypothesis was quickly disproved.

  The attic’s staircase was hanging wide open.

  Camilla froze. She noticed a track of footprints—size twos—in the dust, coming up the stairs and trailing off into the sea of clutter.

  Her breathing stopped. She followed the prints through the room, tiptoeing along the dotted path, and came all the way to the north wall. And there, standing on a trunk in order to see high enough out the window to the courtyard, was Abigail.

  Camilla didn’t believe the apparition. But there the devil was, standing on her tiptoes, surveying the chaos she had created in less than an hour. The blazing tree, the dead bodies, her fighting father. As the little girl continued watching her little chess match play out, she had no idea that for once someone was watching her.

  Camilla felt herself pulling on the rope that was still looped around her left wrist. She hadn’t planned how she would do it until now, but wasn’t it obvious? Hadn’t it played out too perfectly, as if one of them had to die that way like it was the only choice? Yes. This is it. This is the way a mother kills her daughter, the same way she fed her to life. With a rope—a manila umbilical cord—tightened around her throat to ease her gently into that dark, cavernous sleep that bears no consciousness.

  She pulled the rope taught, summoning some reserve of unknown strength to slip it over her daughter’s neck.

  Do it for Peter. He’s out there fighting so you can do this; don’t back down. If she had the chance, she wouldn’t think twice. Just do it.

  That was it. No more thinking, only doing. She raised the rope and tiptoed within five feet of Abigail, then four, then three…

  Then two…

  Then…then…

  Then as a last act of vile deception, the Vincent manor betrayed her with a crack under her step. Abigail spun around and saw her mother towering over her with the rope, and she screamed—not a quick, shrill screech, but a full-bodied wail unlike anything Camilla had ever heard—as the rope came down around her neck.

  Abigail was too quick. She slipped away and went barreling through the attic, knocking over the pyramids of clutter as her mother tore after her.

  Camilla vaulted over broken clothes racks and flew down the staircase just in time to hear Abigail’s feet patter down the stairwell at the end of the hall. She shot through the corridor—past the bedrooms, past the viewing room, past the showroom—and leaped down the steps three at a time, landing on the main floor with a solid thud.

  There was a slam! nearby. Camilla bolted past the dining room and into the kitchen, where the backdoor was still shaking on its hinges.

  She knows she’s trapped. She can’t get out the front, so she’s joining her playmates in the back.

  As Camilla bolted for the porch, she snatched a meat cleaver from the island and emerged in the courtyard, seeing Abigail’s white dress weaving through the blood-drenched snow toward the blazing tree at the far end.

  She raced down the patio steps, entirely fixated on her daughter, and never noticed the contorted man running toward her at ninety degrees. The man leaped through the air, his broken jaw flapping off the side of his face, when another figure soared through the air and drove him into the mud. The second figure grabbed a chunk of marble from a broken fountain and hammered the contorted creature’s head in until it stopped moving.

  “Peter!” Camilla shouted, helping her husband off the corpse. There were gashes covering Peter’s body, and his shirt was nothing but shreds.

  “You owe me,” he grunted. “Again.”

  Camilla reached up and wiped the blood off his face. “Are you all right?”

  “All things considered. Is Abigail...?”

  “No. She just ran by.”

  “Then go, hurry!”

  “Peter…” She didn’t know how to put it. Her assessment of the situation and all its alternatives was more than bleak: it was conclusive. “It’s over. The town’s through the gate, and any second—”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he shot back. “I love you. Now go! Go!”

  There were half a dozen undead still stalking the perimeter of the yard, their hollow concentration-camp faces waiting patiently for the right time to attack.

  Camilla turned for the tree, about to take a step forward when all of a sudden another voice erupted in the air.

  “ENOUGH!”

  Camilla’s eyes bulged at the sound of Moira tearing out of the funeral home. The old woman billowed from the house with a pistol clenched in her gnarled hand. No one else was with her, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close behind.

  Moira stopped. She took in the sights of the burning tree, the bloody yard, and her bleeding son, and quivered with antipathy.r />
  “This ends now!” she screamed. The daggers in her eyes and the gun in her hand pointed straight ahead as she flew down the steps…

  “Mother—”

  “YOU’RE NOT MY SON!” Moira screamed. She locked her vision on her targets like Camilla had when she was running after Abigail. And just like Camilla, Moira never saw the attack coming from the side.

  There were two undead—one man, one woman—on her instantly. They pounced like panthers, and Peter’s warning cries were too late.

  They wrapped Moira’s arms around her back and threw another hand over her mouth to stifle her screaming. Peter raised his gun, but the creatures used his mother as a shield while they backed across the yard and dragged her to the edge of the pond. When her old legs touched the water, Moira began thrashing even more desperately, but it wasn’t enough. The corpses smiled as they pulled her in, deeper and deeper, and then all three of their heads vanished under the surface of the water. A second later, only two came back up.

  “Go,” Peter whispered, letting the tears run down his face. “Last chance. Go.”

  Camilla gripped her cleaver. No more hesitating. She sprinted away and resisted the urge to look over her shoulder again as she trained her eyes on the blazing tree in front of her.

  She could see Abigail clearly now. The blotches of red on the girl’s little white dress sharpened into more defined splatters from fifty feet away, then clearer from forty and thirty and twenty.

  Abigail was already backed up against the burning roots. She leaped over a line of fire and grabbed hold of the ladder boards that snaked up the side of the tree. The tree house wasn’t on fire yet, but the flames were closing in fast.

  Camilla leaped over the flaming roots and went for the ladder too. With one hand she gripped the planks and with the other she swung the cleaver; the blade stuck into the wood and helped her reach the next highest peg. She kept climbing this way, like a mountaineer with a meat cleaver instead of a pickax and a short scrap of rope hanging off her wrist instead of a safety line, and reached the halfway point.

  Abigail’s feet were scrambling like mad. They kicked down chunks of wood and dirt, but Camilla was catching up. She lunged higher with her cleaver, only half a meter away from Abigail’s foot, and stepped up and tried again.

  Abigail reached the platform and pulled herself into the tree house just as the cleaver came down where her leg was a second ago.

  Camilla took the last step up.

  Instantly a foot came flying toward her face. She raised the cleaver to shield herself, but the seven-year-old’s shoe made contact with the knife and sent it spiraling to the ground. Camilla didn’t waste a second. She jumped into the tree house and threw herself at her daughter.

  Abigail slipped free and dove through the only other available exit: the window. There was a thick branch that stretched to the farthest tips of the foliage, and the little girl darted along it with incredible balance. It was as if the tree wouldn’t let her fall—like it was helping her get away.

  Camilla bent her body through the window and set a foot on the branch. Balance didn’t come nearly as easy for her as it had for Abigail.

  The uncontrolled fire roared all around them. The leaves were crumbling as the knotted bark popped with miniexplosions. It was even hotter than it had been in the crematorium.

  Camilla paused, sweat pouring over her face, and looked down: the branch was forty feet above the shallow edge of the pond. There’s no chance it’s deep enough to save a fall. She glanced at the yard, knowing this would be her final view, and saw Peter battling the last of the undead corpses. He was down to his fists, having run out of ammo, and fought just as vigorously, standing in front of the porch to stop them from escaping through the house. He had sacrificed so much for her, she thought. It was time she sacrificed herself for him.

  “You can’t stop this,” a meek voice called out. Abigail was staring back. “It’s too late.”

  “No,” Camilla said. “This ends. Right now.” She crawled farther down the branch, and it groaned under her weight.

  “Please, mom,” Abigail pleaded. The oily darkness drained out of her face, and suddenly she seemed like a regular girl again. In that moment Camilla saw her real daughter standing in front of her, a daughter she might have had in another life. “Let’s leave Nolan. It’s the town, I promise. It’s not me.”

  “Everything you say—everything you are, Abigail—is a lie. This can’t go on.”

  Camilla edged nearer. She was close enough to jump and take both of them down.

  The branch cracked louder. Around them, the flames seared so brightly that she could barely keep her eyes open.

  This is it, Camilla thought, planting her feet on the bark beneath her. Then just before she jumped, she turned and took one final look at Peter wrestling with the last creature across the yard.

  I love you.

  Camilla turned back, but before she could lunge at Abigail, Abigail lunged at her.

  Their bodies crashed together. Camilla’s spine slammed against the bark, and Abigail shrieked on top of her. Her hands shot for her mother’s neck, but the branch jolted beneath them and threw Abigail off balance, allowing Camilla a split second to lash back and toss her daughter over the edge. Abigail went tumbling away, but just when Camilla felt a microsecond of relief, the rope tore across her skin and ripped her off of the branch too.

  Camilla squeezed and clung to the bark with her right arm while the left side of her body dangled perilously from the tree. She looked down and saw Abigail holding onto the cord around her wrist and swaying high above the shallow water.

  The bough cracked.

  Camilla slid under the weight, but the rope slipped first. Abigail howled as the knot pulled loose and the whole cord unraveled in her hand, giving one final scream as she fell through the air and crumpled into the depthless pond, tumbling away like a rotting apple.

  Peter snapped the neck of his last attacker right before a thundering CRACK shot through the courtyard. He spun around in time to see the whole branch Camilla was hanging from explode off the burning trunk and plummet towards the ground.

  “No!” he screamed.

  But there was nothing he could do as the limb crashed into the pond and sent a tidal wave gushing into the air. The water hissed like a monstrous serpent. He ran into the haze, and as he disappeared in the mist, the back door of the Vincent manor burst open with the entire mob of townspeople spilling outside.

  The Nolaners stopped.

  The sight of the backyard was chilling.

  All over, the snow was stained with blood. There were twenty bodies scattered about, and the giant tree that towered over all of them was afire, its smoke curling off the pond like some omnipotent, vaporous dragon.

  Slowly, the Yukon wind blew through and revealed a silhouette hunched in the pond. The figure didn’t move. It was just standing in the cold water, up to its waist, clinging to something that was slung motionless in its arms.

  The Nolaners didn’t dare move closer, and in a second they didn’t have to. For when the wind cast the mist away, they could all see that the figure was Peter Vincent, frozen at the edge of the pond, with his wife, Camilla Vincent, drooped lifelessly in his arms.

  35

  Requiem

  There was so much blood in the pond that Camilla’s sheaves of hair had reverted from dirty blonde to deep, sanguine red. It wasn’t the same as her natural shade, but it helped her look a version of herself again while slung in Peter’s arms. No semblance of horror or surprise was carved into her face; instead, it seemed like she had gone peacefully, her eyelids sealed together and her lips touching in a perfectly neutral expression. She looked as though she was sleeping contentedly with no nightmares to haunt her.

  Peter’s expression was neutral too, appearing numb or unaware. His skin was cut open in countless places along his arms and legs, and his blood—which trickled out in thin red creeks—pooled in Camilla’s cuts, and her blood seeped into his. Their
veins connected them just as their vows had, and for that moment, they were in each other’s bloodstreams. It was impossible to become any closer.

  The faces of the Nolaners were more animated than Peter’s and Camilla’s. A dozen of them had turned their heads to vomit, while others—as many as fifteen or twenty—buckled to their knees and burst into tears or passed out in the snow. Brutus was among the ones who fainted, like a heavy punching bag finally beaten off its chain. Maddock bent down and held the funeral director’s head off the cement. A few other men stepped forward, their jaws set and nostrils still flaring at the repulsive sight and smell of rotting flesh.

  Still, no one dared cross into no-man’s-land: that eerie space between the porch and the pond where twenty corpses were strewn across the snow. The feeling of danger had abated, but there remained a very palpable line that no one seemed willing to pass.

  The two sides faced each other in chessboard formation, one side fully stacked against a field of slaughtered pawns and a cornered king mourning the broken queen in his arms. They stayed that way for a long time, in stalemate, until finally Peter spoke.

  “It’s over.” His words were slow and quiet, but the wind carried the message across the yard. “Go home and be with your families.”

  But the townspeople didn’t move. Their eyes hovered over him and Camilla. Some of them lowered their guns, others raised them.

  “How do we know?” a woman shouted from the mob. It was Sharon Mullard, standing beside her husband, Lou, and their son, Hudson.

  “Who’s left to stone?” Peter said. “Me? Go ahead, kill me. See how much better you feel.”

  The point resonated. There was no danger left in the backyard, and the stark shift in mood confirmed it. The hate and hostility in the air had quelled to nothing more than a cold, ghostly silence, the same kind that seeps from battlefields when both the winners and losers stand back to survey the body count.

  “If you won’t kill me,” Peter said, “help me.”