by Terry Yates
“What did you do then?”
“I took her AK and her cardkey and took the elevator all the way down to this floor. When the doors opened, I thought that they would be waiting for me, but once again, they weren’t.”
“Where were they?”
“I wasn’t sure at first. I walked down hallway after hallway and looked in room after room until I got more or less lost. Then I found a stairwell and walked up a few floors till I found a door, and opened it.
“So where were they?” Shelly asked again.
“They were here,” he answered, holding his hands out and pivoting on one foot. “Right here in this room…all sitting at these desks and consoles.
“Where are they now?” Shelly asked nervously.
“They’re over there,” Marcus answered, matter of fact.
“Where?”
Marcus took her by the hand and led her across the room. In the dim light, Shelly could see that several of the desks and many of the chairs were turned over or completely destroyed. She also noticed several dark pools of what she would have normally guessed to be motor oil, but seeing the dark puddles lying next to broken office equipment could only lead her to one conclusion. It was blood…pools of it. As he pulled her, she saw that Marcus was stepping right through the puddles, splashing what surely had to be blood all over the place. It was everything she could do not to get it on her nightgown. As his pace grew quicker, she began to pull back against him. She knew that whatever he was going to show her couldn’t be good. He didn’t seem to notice her pulling against him, or it had no effect, because he continued to pull her across the room. When they reached the door, she saw that there was no light in it. It was pitch black inside.
“There,” he said, extending his hand.
“They’re all in there?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered back, this time with an eerie smile on his face.
“I don’t want to see in there,” Shelly told him.
“Yes, you do,” he shot back, extending his hand across the threshold of the door.
Shelly entered the small, dark room. Through the darkness, she could see that the walls were white and smeared with the same dark color that the larger room was covered with. Blood. She hardly had time to catch her breath when Marcus moved to the side to allow her to see completely into the room. There were body parts strewn into piles all over the small room. Arms, legs, torsos and heads…many with their caps or sunglasses still on.
Shelly put her hands to her mouth to scream, but before she could, Marcus put his hand over her hands.
“They were trying to kill me,” he said softly. “That was their sole purpose was to kill anyone that didn’t have clearance in this area.”
“What is going on in this place?” Shelly asked, pulling his hand from her mouth, her jaws starting to ache.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “No one does.”
With the smell of blood in her nostrils, and the sight of dead bodies fresh in her mind, Shelly turned around and vomited onto the floor. Marcus stood behind her and pulled her hair back out of her face.
“Remember, Shelly,” he said. “They were trying to kill me. I was just defending myself.”
Shelly was now bent over with her hands on her knees.
“How many of them were there?” she asked, spitting.
“Twenty-two by my count.”
Shelly stood up straight and wiped her mouth as she stepped away from the room, keeping her back to it.
“You killed twenty two people?”
“No…I had help.”
Shelly spun around to face him, but kept Marcus in front of her to block her vision. She didn’t want to see that room again.
“Who helped you?”
“I did,” came a voice from the darkness.
“Not now,” Marcus said back to the darkness.
“Now’s as good time as any, Marcus,” said the voice.
Shelly watched as a figure moved out of the shadows. It was Aurelio Martinez, dressed in the same one-piece outfit that Marcus and all of the dead people were wearing. He stopped next to Marcus and smiled down at Shelly, his eyes big and brown like Marcus’, giving him an almost sinister look.
“Hi, Shelly,” he said, putting his arm around Marcus, who threw it off.
“I said to wait, Martinez. I told you I wanted to finish before you came out.”
“Well, it sounded to me like you pretty much told everything that needed to be told.” Martinez shot back, putting his arm back around Marcus’ shoulder.
“I wasn’t finished.”
“What else was there to say?”
“Yeah,” Shelly interrupted. “What else is there, Marcus? I’ve always known you two were tough, but how did you kill twenty-two people? And how did you two find each other?”
“When I saw how many of them there were, I went back upstairs to formulate a plan and…anyway…to make a long story short, I ran into Martinez.”
Marcus stepped up and placed his hands gently on Shelly’s soldiers.
“Martinez and I are changing,” he said, looking sincerely into her eyes.
“Changing?”
“That’s right,” Martinez threw in. “Changing.”
With this, he picked up a desk that had been turned over, and held it up with one hand. He smiled as he bounced it up and down a few times before hurling it the length of the room, finally smashing against a wall and splintering into dozens of pieces.
“You’ve both gotten stronger.”
“Yes,” Marcus came back, looking annoyed at his best friend. “We are becoming…”
“Just like that man,” Shelly finished.
Marcus nodded. He had figured out already that the beast was a werewolf, so he knew that whomever had bitten him had been part human.
“So, is that what made you kill all of those people in that room?”
“No,” Marcus told her, shaking his head.
“They were trying to kill us!” Martinez interrupted, looking extremely agitated.
“Martinez, please!” cried Marcus. “Let me, will you? Those people are…were ordered to shoot anyone on sight that didn’t have clearance. No ifs, ands, or buts! I told you that one of them was going to shoot me while I was lying on the ground, asking for help.”
Shelly didn’t know how to deal with all of this. Too much was going on at once.
”How did you kill them?” she asked.
“With our bare hands,” Martinez chimed in, both fists raised above his head, a look of pure ecstasy on his face.
Marcus shot him a final “shut up” glance. Martinez waved him away and began to pace silently back and forth. Marcus turned back to Shelly.
“This change…this metamorphosis that we’re going through has made us stronger and quicker, and our senses heightened. We disabled as many cameras as we could, but we didn’t get them all, so we stayed in the shadows, away from the cameras, until the time was right.”
“For what?”
“We ambushed ‘em here last night. Before they or even we knew what was going on, until we had killed them all.”
“How?”
“We snapped their necks or pulled out their hearts,” Martinez, told her, still pacing. “All like that,” he finished, snapping his fingers.
“It couldn’t have taken more than forty-five seconds. We just went at ‘em and before we knew it, every single one of them was dead on the floor. We waited in here for hours to see if there were anymore of them, but no one else came, so we made ourselves at home on this floor. We found a locker room full of these outfits…caps and sunglasses included.”
“We’ve been watching you since you got here,” Martinez said. “Well…most of the time. We still haven’t figured out how to fix the cameras we disabled.”
“You still never answered my question,” Shelly said, ignoring Martinez. “Why would we need to stay down here forever?”
Marcus searched her face, his larger than normal brown eyes looking for po
ssible understanding.
“We can’t go back, Baby,” he answered her, a sad ring to his voice.
“Can’t go back where?”
“To the real world. You said that you saw the monster.”
Shelly nodded.
“Then you know what it can do. Martinez and I would be hunted down like animals. They can’t let werewolves walk around freely. We’d be killed or worse. They might use us as scientific experiments, study us, or turn us into some sort of military weapon. There’s no place for us up there anymore…but we can stay down here forever.
Shelly folded her arms and shook her head. “How can you stay down here forever?”
“Baby, this place is huge. There are tunnels and corridors and secret rooms. We could stay hidden for years.”
“But you’re going to turn into a monster. You’ll come out and kill people…and me, too. In the movies, werewolves will kill their own families when they change. They don’t know any better.”
“Yes…if they’re human,” Marcus said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…I wouldn’t attack another werewolf.”
“Are you saying…” Before she could finish, Shelly knees almost buckled. It had dawned on her in mid sentence what Marcus was telling her.
“You’re saying…”
“Yes.”
“You want me to become what you are?”
“Yes.”
Shelly decided that now was the time to break the news about their newborn.
“That thing…that thing that you’re gonna become, killed our Oliver.” There. She had said it. Hearing it come out of her own mouth finally made it real for her and she began to sob uncontrollably. Marcus pulled her gently to him and she buried her face in his chest, weeping loudly. He rocked her for a moment before pulling her away from him. She looked up to see him smiling. She had just told them that their baby had died and he was smiling.
“Didn’t you here what I said? The monster killed our baby!”
Marcus continued to smile as he and Martinez, who was also smiling, gave each other knowing glances.
“What’s so funny, God dammit?” she screamed. She was almost to the point where she wanted to slap his face.
“Oliver’s not dead, Shelly.”
Shelly wasn’t sure that she had heard right.
“What?”
“I said Oliver’s not dead.”
“You’re crazy! That thing took him right out of my arms! He’s dead!”
“No, he isn’t. The werewolf didn’t kill him.”
Shelly began to grow angry. “That beast kills everything it comes across. I’ve seen it kill three people. I didn’t see it kill another seven. And now you’re gonna tell me that it let Oliver live?”
“Yes,” Marcus answered.
“You found him?”
“Actually Martinez found him.”
Shelly looked at Martinez who smiled and took a bow.
“You found him, Aurelio?”
“I did. I did.”
“Where?”
Happy to have center stage, Martinez began.
“After the monster bit me, I got lost just like Marcus. I had no idea where I was until I was in the woods. I had become weak from the bite, and sat down on a fallen tree. Even with the hurricane blowing, I sat down and rested. I had my head down, trying to shield myself from the rain, when I heard a noise. I was surprised because I could hardly hear a thing through the thunder, the wind, and the rain. My first thought was that it was the thing and it was coming back to finish the job, but I was so tired and beat that I didn’t care anymore. I just sat there with my back turned and waited for it. I wasn’t gonna give it the satisfaction of playing cat and mouse anymore. When I heard the noise again, it sounded like a baby crying. I thought that maybe I was hallucinating because I was in shock or had lost too much blood or something, but then I heard it again. It was a crying baby. I began to look for the source of the sound. I was turning over tree trunks, limbs, and debris, looking under everything. I finally heard the sound coming from under several trees that the hurricane had blown over. When I pulled them aside, I saw a baby…perfectly sheltered from the storm. It almost looked as if someone had placed the trees in perfect symmetrical order, making sure that the baby was completely out of the rain. When I picked the baby up, I saw it had brown skin and blue eyes. There was only one couple on this island that the little boy could’ve belonged to.”
Shelly wanted him to stop talking. She had hardly heard a word he’d said since she had been told that Oliver was alive. She wanted to know where he was. She didn’t care about the hows and the whys. Her baby was alive and that was all that mattered.
“Where is he?” she blurted out.
Martinez stopped talking, a hurt expression on his face. “Don’t you wanna hear the rest of the story…how I made it, baby and all, to the bunker? How I met up with Marcus?
“Maybe later,” she answered, her eyes welling up with tears. “I just want to see my baby.” By the word baby, Shelly had started to cry again.
Martinez looked at Marcus and shrugged. Marcus smiled and walked away from Shelly, almost disappearing into the darkness. She could see his silhouette bending down over something and carefully picking it up. He then turned around and walked back into the light, where she could see that he was holding a baby.
She quickly moved forward and looked down into the baby’s face. It was Oliver. His chubby brown legs and arms were moving the way all little babies arms and legs move…in no particular direction and for no particular reason. They just move them. She all but snatched him from his father and cradled him in her arms. She smiled as she gently bounced and swayed and hummed, letting the baby know who his mother was. His eyes were closed, but she didn’t care. Babies only opened their eyes a few times in the first few days anyway. His bottom was covered with a towel that she supposed Marcus had found in the one of the locker rooms.
Shelly lifted the baby up, and then took out one of her breasts and put the baby’s mouth to it. As the child began to suck, the joy of motherhood returned to her. She had her Oliver back, she had her husband back, and she had her Kayla upstairs. All was becoming perfect in her world. She closed her eyes and continued to hum as the milk flowed from her to her baby.
“Honey?” came a voice. “Honey? Baby? Shelly!”
Shelly opened her eyes to see Marcus looking down at her and no longer smiling.
“Baby? Are you with us?” he asked.
“What about the babies?” she asked.
We can be a family, Shelly. All of us.”
“You want to bite me and the babies and turn us into what you are…a killer?” Shelly was becoming frightened. She pulled the baby from her breast and cradled him to her chest. It was one thing for her to join her husband but there was no way she was going to subject her babies…her innocents. She had a choice in the matter. They didn’t.
“We’ll be together forever,” Marcus answered, a look of sincerity on his face.
“I can’t, Baby. I can’t let you turn our children into werewolves,” she said, almost turning her baby from him. She saw that Marcus’ and Aurelio’s faces looked sad, but with those crazy Salem’s Lot eyes, she couldn’t tell.
“Oliver doesn’t have a choice,” Marcus said.
“What? What do you mean?”
Shelly was reeling. What did Marcus mean that Oliver didn’t have a choice? She was making this choice for the both of them. They would not become werewolves. They would just have to figure out how to keep Marcus from turning into a werewolf, or lock him up somewhere. Maybe Dr. Kyler could help him, or that Professor O’Hearley. They were smart. They could figure out something.
“He does have a choice,” she told Marcus. “I’m making it for him.”
Martinez dropped his head and moved away.
“No, Shelly, he doesn’t have a choice,” Marcus came back.
He began to take the baby from her arms, but she wouldn’t let go.
“Shelly…”
Shelly was cradling the baby tightly to her chest now.
“Shelly.”
“No!”
As the tears began to stream down her face, Marcus placed his hand gently against the child’s cheek and turned his head carefully to the side, exposing his neck. There, just below and behind his ear was a small bite mark. The wound was tiny and seemed to be already healing, but Shelly had seen the beast, Miss Opal, and the tall leggy model all with wounds and marks that had healed quickly.
“No…” she moaned. “Not my baby…”
As the tears continued to flow, Marcus placed his hands back on her shoulders. Before she knew it, she slapped Marcus hard across the face.
“You bastard!” she screamed, and tried to slap him again, but Marcus’ new lightning fast reflexes stopped her hand in midair.
“You worthless piece of shit bastard!” she screamed again, trying to pull her hand away from his grip, but couldn’t. “You bit our baby so you could blackmail me into becoming what you are! You bastard!”
She dropped her head and buried her face into her baby’s, Marcus still holding tightly to her hand.
“Shelly,” he said softly, letting go of her hand. She didn’t answer. “Honey, I didn’t bite him.”
“What?” She hadn’t heard him. She wasn’t even listening. Her rage was such that all she heard was her own crying.
“I didn’t bite him,” he repeated, putting his hand under her chin. “He…it…bit him.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, wiping her nose as she looked up into his eyes.
“I swear, Baby, when Martinez brought him to me, he had already been bitten.”
Shelly turned toward Martinez who was still standing off to himself.
“Then it was you!”
She tried to charge him, but Marcus held her back.
“He didn’t do it, Shelly. I told you…It bit Oliver.”
“How do you know? Maybe Aurelio bit him before he found you!”
“I didn’t…” Martinez tried to say, glancing over at Marcus for some help.