The little girl sobbed a few times before saying, “Okay.”
“What’s your name?” Grace asked.
“Caitlin.”
“How old are you, Caitlin?”
“Eleven.”
“Okay, Caitlin. You stay right here, stay quiet. Keep the door locked, and I’ll be right back.”
“Okay.”
Grace walked across the bathroom, looking for anything that might work as a weapon. She saw nothing useful. She walked to the door, opened it slowly, and stepped into the hall.
It was just as quiet as before. In fact, the place actually felt deserted. She looked to her right, through the window of the broken door. It was a little bit lighter outside. She could make out trees and several of the surrounding mountains. She turned to her left and looked down the empty hallway.
Nobody.
She hurried back toward the room. Immediately, she felt guilty about leaving Caitlin behind, but she would be fast. Besides, surely nobody really bitten her parents. The idea was absurd.
Grace tried to convince herself that the little girl had only been frightened by Terry’s story. She might have had a nightmare. Her parents were probably still asleep in their room.
A loud crash from the kitchen interrupted Grace’s thoughts. She stopped walking. The next sound was a dragging of sorts, as if something was being dragged across the floor in the kitchen. Grace waited to see if anyone would emerge from the steel double doors. The dragging seemed to be approaching in stops and starts.
Drag...pause. Drag...pause.
Grace took a tentative step forward.
The doors to the kitchen started to flutter. Grace froze again. This time, she was unable to move. A man nudged open one of the steel doors, then stumbled a bit. He turned and reached down toward the floor. In the dim light, Grace couldn’t tell at first what he was pulling out of the kitchen. Then, as the man exited the door completely, she could clearly see what he was dragging. Her body stiffened.
The man pulled stubbornly at a hand. On the other side of the door lay the rest of the person being dragged on the floor. The man jerked and twitched as he tugged hard at the person’s hand. Eventually, the man pulled the person out far enough for Grace to see the head and shoulders of another man. The second man lay on the ground. Lifeless.
Grace wanted to help, but she also wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere but where she stood now. Why was this man dragging the other man across the floor? Was the second man injured? And if he was, why didn’t the man seek help from the others?
Grace got a swift, violent answer.
With one sharp tug, the man ripped the arm off the second man. The sound of the arm pulling completely away from the unconscious man’s body was like a tree branch breaking in half. Grace felt her stomach lurch, and she wanted to vomit.
The man stumbled backward against the wall and landed hard on the floor. Grace could see his face now. She raised her hands to her mouth to refrain from screaming.
The man’s face was covered with blood. He wore a light blue button-down shirt that was bloodstained around the arms, shoulders, and chest. He continued to hold on to the arm that had once belonged to the man on the floor.
Just when Grace thought it couldn’t get any worse, the man did the unthinkable: He brought the arm to his mouth and bit into the flesh. Or, rather, he gnashed at it like a wild animal tearing into live prey. Grace could only stand there and watch while the man devoured the arm. In that moment, her brain became temporarily disconnected from her muscles. Even if she wanted to run at that moment, she couldn’t. She no longer had control, mental or physical.
The guy is fucking eating a person’s arm!
Grace gaped as the man ripped off shredded pieces of fabric that were once part of a shirt and continue to eat. She wondered how she was going to get to Charlie and Caitlin.
Caitlin.
She’s still in the bathroom!
Grace’s brain function finally came back to her. She clenched and unclenched her hands just to be sure. There was no exit behind her; the door was broken. She couldn’t lead this man back to Caitlin. Her only option was to get to the room. To Charlie.
She took a step forward. The man flinched, as if sensing her next move. He stopped eating what was now a blob of flesh, bone, and tendons. His head turned and he stared at Grace. She stared right back at him and took another step forward. The man growled and dropped the arm in his lap. With no hesitation, Grace broke out into a full sprint toward her room. The man crawled to his feet with amazing speed. He ran at her with his arms outstretched. Grace reached the door before him, but only by a few steps. She threw the door open and, with equal haste, tried to slam it shut, but the man was already there.
“Charlie!” Grace screamed, as she pressed the door on the man’s hands. Charlie jumped out of the bed the moment Grace burst into the room. He saw Grace struggling to close the door. A man with bloodied arms was reaching for her, groping and clawing at her. Charlie stared at the thick, dark blood. It was the kind of blood that comes from deep within a person’s internal organs. Charlie jumped from the bed and picked up a hiking pole off the floor. He ran to Grace’s side and jammed it into the man’s hands, trying to force him back from the door.
“I got the door!” he yelled at Grace. “Grab the gun from my bag! It’s loaded!”
Grace let go of the door as Charlie leaned against it with his back. She ran to the end of the bed, reached into his bag, and grabbed the pistol.
“Turn the safety off!” Charlie said. “Aim through the opening, and shoot this fucker!”
Grace jumped up and stood on the bed. Her hands shook as she held the gun out in front of her. She could hear Charlie shouting, “SHOOT, SHOOT,” but all she could see through tunneled vision was a pair of blooded arms reaching into the room. She aimed and fired twice. The man’s arms went limp in the doorway. A second later, he fell backward and disappeared. The weight of Charlie’s body slumped against the door as it slammed shut.
Grace stood on the bed. Her heart pounded and her arms and shoulders shook as she held the gun aimed at the door. Charlie stood up and ran to her.
“You’re all right,” he said softly. “Give me the gun. Give me the gun.” Grace let the gun fall into Charlie’s hands; her face whitened with panic. Charlie held the gun away from the both of them as he helped her off the bed. He held her as she sat down. “What the fuck just happened?” he said.
Before Grace could answer, the man came crashing through the door, sending splinters of wood in every direction. Grace screamed, her hands shaking in front of her face. Charlie turned and fired three shots into the man’s head. He fell backward with the dead weight of a felled tree. Charlie kept the gun aimed at the man, even as blood pooled on the floor.
Without turning around, he pointed toward the far corner of the room. “Get over there,” he said. Grace, doubled over as if in pain, walked over to the corner of the room. Charlie stepped over the man’s legs and kicked his feet. No reaction. He kept the gun aimed at the man’s head and squatted low next to the body.
“Charlie,” Grace said, her voice shaking, imploring him not to get any closer to this man.
“Shh,” he said. “It’s okay. He’s dead.”
The peak of the adrenaline rush was over, but Charlie’s heart still raced savagely inside his chest. He stared down at the body and quickly realized the horror that lay on the floor in the doorway of their bedroom. The man lay dead, his mouth open. Charlie could see bits of flesh and shards of bone and fingernail in the man’s teeth. Charlie retched as the combined stench of blood, urine, and decay became unbearable.
Grace stood in the corner, unable to comprehend what had just occurred.
This must be the man who bit Caitlin’s parents.
Just then, Terry came hustling into the room.
“Is everybody okay? I heard gunsh—” She took a step back when she saw the body on the floor. Charlie looked up and said nothing. He couldn’t yet find any words to
describe what had happened.
Terry’s jaw dropped and her eyes grew wide. “Oh, my God. Are you folks all right?” she asked. Charlie nodded. Grace, huddled in the corner, shook her head.
“The bathroom,” she mumbled and tried to swallow. “In the bathroom...” She pointed down the hall.
“You were in the bathroom?” Terry asked.
Grace shook her head again. “A little girl,” she said. “In the bathroom. I, I think this man killed her parents.”
“Oh, my God,” Terry said.
“He just came busting through our door,” Charlie said. “Grace ran in, he was covered in blood. I had to protect us.”
Terry nodded. “I’ll go get the girl.”
“Farthest stall,” Grace said.
Terry disappeared from sight. Charlie got up and walked back over to Grace. Her hands, cupped around her shoulders, trembled violently as her brain tried frantically to make sense of it all. Charlie reached out and gently grabbed her hand.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Everything’s fine now.”
Grace shook as a horrific scream from the hallway pierced through the silence. Nothing was fine. She shut her eyes and again began shaking her head.
No! No! No!
Charlie turned toward the door. He aimed the gun at the opening and waited. The man was still dead, lying on the floor. The scream had come from down by the bathroom. Charlie wondered if it was Terry. It sure sounded like her...
Another scream. This one was even more alarming than before.
Because along with it came the sounds of tearing and ripping, gnawing and scraping.
What the fuck IS that? he thought. No longer aware of Grace’s convulsive responses to what was going on, Charlie found himself approaching the door, as if gliding in a dreamlike state. He didn’t even bother to step around the corpse that lay in the doorway; he stepped through the blood and tissue and wandered out into the hall.
At the far end of the hall, lying in the bathroom doorway, Terry’s body was being savagely ripped and torn apart by—a little girl? Charlie turned to Grace, asking her with his eyes if this could possibly be the same little girl she had found in the bathroom. He was unable to form the words with his mouth. He simply shook his head in horror.
Grace, nearly comatose, and with tears flowing, slid down the corner she had been standing in and curled into a ball. She rested her head on her knees and began to rock back and forth. Anything to keep her body from shaking.
In the hallway, Charlie crept along the wall. He wasn’t sure what made him decide to approach the two people on the floor. His mind was too busy trying to grasp the idea that a person, no more than ten feet from him, was currently kneeling down over Terry, masticating and clawing at her flesh. After a few steps, he stopped. Frozen. He watched as the little girl took bite after ravenous bite of the big woman’s midsection.
The girl attacked with an animalistic ferocity. She wasted no time lacerating Terry’s abdomen and pulling out her intestines. Charlie gagged as the little girl gnashed at the long, sausage-like organ. He looked down, attempting to avert his eyes from what he just saw.
“Shoot her!” Terry screamed. “Shoot us both!”
Charlie jerked his head back toward the scene, stunned that Terry was even still alive. She was lying on her back, head tilted to one side, screaming commands at Charlie with her last remaining breaths. But Charlie had lost temporary control of his limbs. He stared at Terry’s face. Her left eye was completely gone and the whole left side of her face looked like shredded beef.
“Shoot us!” she screamed again. At this, the little girl stopped gnashing at Terry’s organs and looked up at Charlie. With a twitchy, jarring motion, she stood up and charged him.
Adrenaline finally rushed back. Charlie felt restored control over his arms and legs. He raised the gun and fired two shots; both made contact with the little girl square in the forehead. Her feet collapsed underneath her and she stumbled face-first onto the floor. Blood spattered against the wall and against Charlie’s legs. He involuntarily stepped back as her head came to rest at his feet.
“You have to shoot me!” Terry shouted, but Charlie was somewhere else, somewhere far back in the reaches of his mind. He looked down at the little girl, his gun still pointed at her head. She couldn’t have been much older than ten years old, he thought as he stared at her lifeless body, twisted and contorted at his feet. What had he done? He just shot a little girl in the head. He looked down at the gun between his hands and asked himself how he’d managed to pull the trigger on a small child.
He looked back at Terry screaming from the floor, grabbing at her insides as she bled out, but her shouts were hollow and distant. This little girl is dead, he told himself. But there was nothing he could do now. He needed to see how he could help Terry, if he could at all. He stepped around the body and walked down the hall.
“I’m gonna turn soon if you don’t shoot me!” Terry screamed.
“You’re what?” Charlie asked, shaking his head.
“I’m gonna turn!” she said again, reaching out to him. “You have to shoot me in the head!”
He knew he was out of bullets, but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that he wasn’t about to shoot another human being.
“I’m not gonna shoot you,” he said. “You need help.”
“You have to!” Terry yelled, blood erupting from her mouth in a geyser. “She’s become one of the undead!”
“The what?” he asked. He shook his head again. “I’m out of bullets, anyway.”
“Well then get something and bash my fucking brains!”
Charlie was appalled. “Don’t you understand?! You need medical attention!” Charlie’s confusion had slightly morphed into aggravation. Nothing Terry said was making any sense.
“I’m already dead, can’t you see?” She reached down to her abdomen and lifted her exposed organs. “Look! Look! See? I’m gonna be coming after you soon if you don’t kill me!”
He ran his fingers through his hair, tried to understand this rationale. Why did Terry need him to kill her? What the hell did “undead” mean? He also wanted to get back to Grace. God forbid Grace stepped out into the hall now, Charlie wasn’t prepared to offer an explanation about the little girl.
“Let me think for a second,” Charlie said as he paced back and forth next to her body.
“There’s no time to think, you have to fucking kill me!” she repeated.
“What the fuck is your problem?!”
“Listen,” Terry said between gasps. This time, her voice was low, blood gurgling in her throat as she spoke. She reached out to him with the hand that was still somewhat intact. Charlie saw she still had four fingers on this hand. “I’m dead. Okay? The little girl turned. She was an undead. Remember? From last night? The man in your bedroom must have bit her. Now, before I turn into that, you have to kill me. Okay? Just kill me.”
She’s delusional, Charlie thought.
“Lady,” Charlie began, “You need help. There’s nobody around here, as far as I can tell. Otherwise, they would have heard your screams by now. So now we just have to figure this out.”
“There’s nothing to figure out!” she yelled. “Just fucking kill me already!”
Charlie waved his hands down. He paced some more, tried to block her taunts from his mind. He had to find a way to get help up to the hut. And why was nobody else out of their rooms? Where was everybody?
“You fucking pussy,” she provoked. “You’re lucky you survived two attacks. Wait ’til there’s more! There will be more!”
“Shut the fuck up, lady” Charlie warned.
“Pussy!”
“Lady, you need to calm down or else-”
“PUSSY! PUSSY!” Terry turned her head to the side and coughed up a mass of blood. She then stared back at Charlie. “You and your little whore are next ya know.”
Charlie closed his eyes, tried to clear the anger from his head.
“You’re a sick, fucking bitc
h. You know that?”
“HAHA!” Terry taunted. “You’re not going anywhere! You’ll never get off this fucking mountain! You and your whore wife are going to die up here, just like me! Because you’re a fucking little city, pussy boy!”
Charlie ran to the side of the hall and kicked the wall. The sting in his toe shot through his foot and he stumbled to his right, but managed to stay on his feet.
“HAHAHA! You can’t even do that right, you little fuck!”
“LADY! Shut the fuck up and let me think!”
“That’s all you pussies do is think!”
“Shut UP!”
“You better go check on your whore! She’s probably already being eaten by one of those things! She’s probably going to die the worst fucking death you could ever imagine!!!”
Charlie screamed, his mettle finally lost. A large picture frame hung on the wall to his right. He hurried over and pulled it down. Then, with blinding force and a rage he never knew existed within him, he brought the frame down on her forehead. Blow after blow, the frame dug deeper into the front of Terry’s head. He screamed uncontrollably as he repeatedly crushed her skull. After a while, Charlie unconsciously tilted the frame so that the next blows came from the large corner. The heavy, triangular edge sliced through her weakened frontal bone, scattering bits of skull and brain matter. He wasn’t even looking at her anymore. He was a savage, crushing any last bit of life that remained inside Terry. His eyes were closed tight, but salty tears rolled down his face and over his lips.
Finally, fatigue began to set in as the pain in his stomach, caused by his own guttural screams, began to overtake him.
Exhausted, he let the frame hit Terry’s mutilated head one final time. He slouched over and tried to catch his breath. His alertness now returned. He remembered Grace all by herself, crouched in the corner of the room. He swore at himself, dropped the picture frame, and ran back toward the room.
He called out her name as he ran. He needed to hear her voice, to see her. After what had happened with the little girl, he’d never forgive himself if he let something happen to Grace, inadvertently or not.
Dead Summit (Book 1): Dead Summit Page 7