by Tim Curran
If it was locked from the inside, he decided right then and there, he wasn’t bothering with it. No way in hell he was going under or over the walls.
Too damn dangerous.
This was bad enough.
He could smell the owner of those shoes just fine. It smelled like he’d just shit his pants. But there was another odor there, too, a sharp, lingering stink that made Lou’s flesh go tight. Eyes bulging, teeth locked together, he took hold of the latch and gave it a little pull.
Unlocked, the door swung noiselessly out.
A man was sitting on the toilet, his eyes glazed like those of a dead fish on a toxic beach, staring sightlessly. He wore a dark blue cop’s uniform, badge in place. There was a shotgun clutched in his hands, the barrel jabbed under his throat. Behind his head there was a great smear of dark, sticky material.
Lou reached out to touch him, his brain screaming, did he do it? Did he do it? Did he—
He touched the man’s arm.
It was stiff and unyielding.
Dead, yes, certainly.
Lou sighed, letting some of the terror run out of him as if somebody had pulled a drain plug somewhere in his soul. It subsided.
He jabbed a finger at the cop’s shoulder.
The shotgun and the hands that held it slid down a few inches and his face fell right off. Not just his face, but the entire front of his head slid free like ice from a roof and landed in his lap with a wet, bloody thud, a few pounds of raw hamburger.
Lou wheeled around, teeth clenched, dry heaves convulsing his belly.
Blew his head off, sure. Nothing to be afraid of.
This cop had balls. When whatever took this town settled into him as well, he’d taken his own life. That took courage, foresight. For even death was better than becoming an animal like those prowling the streets.
Lou could almost picture him coming in here, perhaps even calmly, the infection clawing at his brain. Sitting on the toilet and doing what he knew must be done.
Yes, this guy—his name badge said FRANK CONVERS—was strong.
The weak ones were outside.
Lou closed the stall door, giving Convers the only respect and privacy possible in this convoluted, primeval world that eons ago had been called Cut River. He mumbled some half-remember prayer from his childhood and left the restroom.
Out in the station, he studied the other entrance off the bullpen.
No door, just an arch. But it was dark in there, horrible, forbidding. Like the entrance to the cave of some voracious beast. Such darkness…as if someone had hung a blanket on the other side of the doorway. It bled into the bullpen, tendrils of it, a creeping midnight fungus.
Fuck it.
Lou waltzed right over there, reached inside along the wall. He found a switch right away, turned it on.
It was sort of a duty room, he guessed.
There were more desks, a podium, lockers against the wall. Nothing threatening, only his fevered imagination this time creating monsters out of whole cloth.
But if he didn’t have the right, then who?
There were places for them to hide, of course: under tables, behind cabinets. There were always places. But his sense of perception was getting preternaturally sharp by that point. A tool of instinct reborn in a world of computers and biotechnology gone to ruin.
No, this place was safe.
He made a quick inspection, hoping for something, anything, that might give him a clue to this horror show and how it had happened. But there was nothing. Duty roster on the podium. Scraps of paper here and there with crabbed phone numbers or license plate numbers, addresses, descriptions of vehicles.
No, no answers here. Only more questions.
Beyond the row of lockers, set in a little ell, there was a heavy steel door with a wedge of safety glass in it two-thirds of the way up. There was a red sign to the right of it that said:
WARNING
AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY
CONTAINMENT AREA
Containment area?
Lou went up to it and looked through the glass. It was brightly lit within. There were what appeared to be three or four small holding cells. Probably kept the bad guys here until they were delivered to the county lock-up.
He was about to turn away when he saw a shadow shift in there, in the far cell.
Was he really seeing it?
He pressed his face up to the cool glass. Yes. Someone was in there, hunched in the corner. He kept watching them. They made no aggressive or questionable movements.
What was there to worry about, really?
They were in a cell for chrissake.
Only in movies did maniacs or monsters burst through iron bars.
Lou opened the door and there was a loud buzzing sound from an alarm.
He knew if he went in and let the door close behind him, there would be no getting out; as a safety precaution, he saw, you needed a second party to let you out from the other side.
Good he noticed that.
He let it close and found a chair, dragged it over there. He opened the door, that damn buzzing rattling him again. He put the chair in front of the door. But it was heavy and made to close automatically. It dragged the chair with it, but could not close all the way.
He climbed over the chair and into the containment area.
Cells against one wall, a small desk opposite with a keypad on it. Sure, the buttons opened the cells. If he didn’t touch those he was safe.
He walked to the far cell.
Some guy was hunched up in the corner. He wasn’t moving.
Lou found his voice. “Hey,” he said. “You in there.”
The head snapped around.
Some young guy, unshaven, face slack, eyes darting from his skull. “You…you’re not one of them?” he asked like he couldn’t believe it.
“No, I’m normal. You?”
The guy was on his feet and up to the bars so fast Lou stepped back. “Jesus Christ…oh shit…get me out of here before she comes back. Hurry.” He pressed his face to the bars, looking nervously towards the door. “If she comes back, she’ll kill us both. I’ve been pretending I was dead every time she came in here. Come on, man! Don’t just fucking stand there!”
Lou went over to the desk, to the keypad. He pressed one button after the other. There was a buzzing and the cell doors each made a metallic clicking sound and opened an inch or two.
The guy came running out, grasped Lou happily by the shoulders.
“I’m Steve,” he said.
“Lou.”
“Okay. You got a gun. Good. Might need it.” He kept casting a wary eye towards the door as if he was expecting the Devil to waltz in any moment. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three years old, but his eyes were ancient. “Drunk driving. They threw me in for drunk driving. And then that shit happened…oh for Christ’s sake, did the world end? What happened?”
“I don’t know. I got here a few hours ago,” Lou told him, the idea that it had only been a few hours sucking the wind from him, “and, well, everything’s gone crazy here. But, no, the world hasn’t ended. Just Cut River. It’s gone.”
Steve looked like he needed to cry badly. His eyes were wet, his lips trembling. “We have to get out of here, man. We gotta be gone when she comes back.”
“She?”
Steve looked exasperated. “She’s…well, shit, there’s no time for that,” he said, pulling Lou to the door. “I’ll explain later if we make it out.”
Out the door they went into the duty room.
Steve was holding Lou’s arm like a frightened child. He started blabbering about how terrible she was, how she’d slaughtered the prisoners that weren’t infected. How she’d released the ones that were. How he’d played dead every time she came around, mimicking the coma the infected ones went into at the end, right before they woke up—
“How about we just be quiet?” Lou suggested, the guy’s frantic, droning voice getting under his skin.
�
�Yeah, yeah, sure,” Steve said. “You’re right, you’re right.”
Lou figured this woman was probably another psycho and he knew how to deal with them, thank you very much…at least he hoped so. Then he started wondering if guns would stop them. But he put that from his mind. They were flesh and blood (he hoped), they were alive. Sick, contaminated, insane, but still living. Yes, they would die. If you asked them the right way, they would die just fine. He had the .38, but something a little heavier would have been nice.
“Do you know where they keep the guns?” he asked Steve.
“No. I mean, there’s gotta be a weapon’s locker around here somewhere, but it’s not something they tell us convicts about,” he said, half-joking, half-serious.
“Don’t suppose then, you’d know where the keys to those cruisers outside are?”
Steve nodded happily. “Sure. They’re right in the cruisers.”
“They leave the keys in ‘em?”
“Small-town, man. Nobody steals too many cars here and especially not a patrol car for chrissake. What would be the point? Kind of obvious aren’t they?”
Lou shrugged.
Well there, at last, was something he could use. If the keys were in them and the radios were working, then he could contact the state police or drive out of town and probably both. It was a plan.
As they eased out into the bullpen, Steve said, “Unless, you know, one of them got to the cars. It’s possible. They’re not stupid, you know. Not at all.”
They made it out of the police station and started down the long, shadowy corridor. Steve was still stuck to Lou like a wart on a witch’s ass. Lou kept trying to give him the hint by trying to gently push him away, but it did no good.
As they moved quietly down the hallway, Lou was struck by the emptiness, that awful pressing, confining sense of claustrophobia that he was a mouse in a maze, every movement being studied, the walls trembling, ready to crush him at any moment.
They made it to the entryway and the front door was standing open, blackness and damp blowing in. And that stopped Lou dead because he was certain he’d closed it behind him. He could’ve sworn he had…hadn’t he? It was all such a muddle in his brain it was really hard to say.
His grip was wet on the .38. He thought the gun might slip from his hand like a greasy banana.
“Okay,” he said to Steve in a whisper, “we’re going to go straight out those doors and then we’re making for the parking lot and one of those cruisers. You lag behind, you fuck up in any way, I leave your ass. You understand me?”
Steve nodded sullenly. “Yes. I know. I know we…”
But his voice faded away as a sound came drifting down the stairs off to their right, a cold inhuman cackling like marbles rattling in a metal can. No more human than that and maybe even less.
“Stay with me…stay here with me.”
Lou wheeled madly about, bringing the gun up.
The stairwell was a well of grainy shadows.
Steve let out a strangled gasp and she came.
One minute there was darkness brooding before them and the next…the next she came out of it, seeping like oil. And maybe had Lou been smart he would have opened up on her, but he didn’t. Whereas the Snake Woman had appalled him, filled him with a sense of crawling horror, this one inspired lust.
She poured out of the darkness, smooth and easy as cream, wearing a gun belt and nothing else, a nightstick in her hand. She was tall with a cap of short spiky black hair, her skin white as marble. Her legs were long and shapely, her breasts jutting like traffic cones. She moved with such a pure animal grace, with such a fluid sweep of muscle, she was on them in seconds, her eyes yellow drowning pools.
Lou took a step backward or maybe forward, because, Jesus, crazy as it was, he wanted her badly. Wanted those taut arms and legs wrapped around him, wanted those full lips on his own. She was a woman from a fantasy, from a skin magazine. And, God help him, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the sliver of pubic hair between her legs.
And then two things happened.
Steve screamed.
And the woman touched Lou…and her hand, cold as refrigerated beef, took his wrist and he saw that she was not beautiful or desirable at all. Streaks of something sticky had dried in slashes across her belly and down her legs like the dark flow of menstrual blood. Her hair was wild and greasy, her teeth gnashing, chattering, begging to be put to use.
And those eyes, those horrible eyes, rimmed in silver, two yellow miasmic holes that looked down into a snakepit.
And she was growling.
Her head darted forward like a viper’s, anxious to bite into his throat.
Steve was yelling something at him, but Lou couldn’t seem to make it out.
“SHOOT HER!” he cried. “SHOOT HER YOU DUMB GODDAMN IDIOT!”
And Lou understood as pale white arms encircled him like the frigid tentacles of some deep-sea squid. She was a monster and he had to kill her. Simple as that.
He pulled the trigger and the chamber explosion rocked him back into reality, but the barrel of the gun was behind the woman and the bullet drilled harmlessly into the paneling.
And then she slapped the .38 from his fist.
Her hand, palm flattened, struck him in the chest and he went down on his ass.Steve made a run for the door and she caught him by the collar and spun him around in a perfect circle, his head slamming into the wall with a hollow thud. His knees went to putty and he collapsed.
Lou was screaming now as he crawled madly on all fours for the gun and actually felt his fingertips brush it as she took hold of one of his ankles and flipped him over effortlessly.
And then she was on him.
He could feel her marble skin sucking the warmth from him as she pinned him down, rode him like a lover, legs to either side, pelvis grinding against him crudely. He clawed and punched at her and she trapped his arms. Her face came in closer, closer, a ribbon of foamy slime hanging from her lips and running down one of his cheeks, cold as Freon. Then her lips brushed over his and her tongue licked his face like a lollipop, leaving a burning trail in its wake and all he could think of was the germs, that pestiferous infection eating into him like acid and that revolting stink like rotting fish.
It was over and he knew it.
She was too strong. He couldn’t fight her.
Her teeth flashed and she made to bite him in the throat…and then there was a clap of thunder and she fell off him.
Steve was on his knees a few feet away with the gun in his hand.
The woman came back up, a bloody hole in her shoulder.
Steve fired again and the bullet pulverized her cheek, leaving a raw bleeding cavity draped by a flap of smoking skin.
He never got another one off.
She launched herself at him and struck him like a freight train exiting a tunnel. They went down in a heap and her teeth sank into his throat and Steve’s screams turned to a watery gurgling and then there was blood everywhere as his jugular painted them both red.
And then Lou had the gun.
She snapped her head in his direction, red ruined face electric with triumph. Her mouth was hanging open, lips drawn away from bloodstained teeth.
Lou put a bullet in her head.
She flopped over, limbs twitching.
He put another slug in her head and she was still.
Making a shrill moaning sound, he ran for the door and was outside into the night, the air so fresh, so welcome, so cleansing.
He nearly fell down the steps and if he had, if he had—
They would have gotten him.
He would have fallen right into their midst.
They were everywhere now. Like locusts swarming a field, they were thronged at the foot of the steps, leering and howling, driven into a rage at the smell of blood coming from inside.
He fired at them until the .38 clicked on an empty chamber.
He threw it and turned, running back inside.
He could hear them coming, he
ar them screeching and hissing. He went back to where Steve and the woman lay in a spreading ocean of blood. He flipped her over, popped the catch on her gun belt and slid her 9mm semi-auto out of its holster. He worked the slide and put a round in the chamber.
And they were on him.
Two, then three of them.
Snarling and snapping, their hooked fingers tore at him like claws.
He rolled away and brought the 9mm to bear. He gave them each a round that did little more than distract them, buying him time, and then he was sprinting down the corridor and into the police station. He found the door marked EXIT he’d seen before and threw himself out into the night, missing the steps entirely and coming down hard on the sidewalk.
Dazed, he pulled himself up, the gun still—miraculouslyin his hand. He’d split his lip on the concrete and his mouth was wet, metallic-tasting.
Not much time now.
But the parking lot was before him, he could see the cars.
Going to make it, a voice in his head was saying. You’re going to make it, by God.
He started running towards the cruisers, his body aching, his lungs raw, but it was just a little further, a little further. Behind him, the EXIT door flew open and they began pouring out, dozens and dozens of them, the citizens of Cut River.
Men, women, and children.
A pack of dogs, shrieking and yelping, an insane sea of white faces and clutching hands. Lou fired a few more rounds in their direction and then he was in the parking lot.
He threw himself behind the wheel of the nearest cruiser, noting the riot gun in its holder, and his fingers sought madly for dangling keys and found them.
Bless you, Steve, God bless you.
He threw the locks on the doors and started the cruiser up, his body thrumming with a mixture of joy and terror. He could hear traffic on the radio and knew that the world still existed. Really, truly existed out there somewhere.
He squealed in reverse and saw the lot was full of them.
Like human insects they hopped and careened and spread out. They rushed at the cruiser and he drove straight through them, casting them aside as he roared out into the street, the last straggler sliding from the hood.
And then he was in the streets.
Safe. Free.