by Eddie Patin
Harvey shook his head as his face and ears started to feel warm from the buzz, and picked up the heavy gun, looking out into the bright red parking lot.
They were in the shit for sure.
And he deserved it.
Just then, something shimmered across the front of a blue sedan...
“What the shit?” Harvey said quietly to himself, peering at the anomaly.
Another shimmer appeared and disappeared in front of the land cruiser parked next to the blue car. Looked back at the blue sedan again, Harvey could barely make out the shape of a ... leg? ... standing in front of the trunk and bumper.
There was something out there...
Or more than one thing...
And as Harvey squinted and peered into the red, hot air of the parking lot, trying to make sense of the bending light and demonic camouflage, he suddenly saw a pair of yellow, reptilian eyes staring back at him...
11 - Arthur Kline
Colorado Springs, CO
“Damn it, I knew it!” Arthur said to himself.
He was in the garage, digging through his barely-organized cabinets and shelves full of tools, painting supplies, electrical parts, screws—for years, he’d been stashing away every little set of screws and straps and brackets he came across in new boxes of cheap furniture from the big-box stores. He never threw away any of the cheap, soft metal parts that came with junky fixtures and shelving that he had to assemble himself.
Instead, Arthur kept everything in a loose collection of several tool boxes and divider containers, stacked inside a large cabinet.
Usually, whenever he had to, say, put together something—made in China—Arthur replaced the cheap shit with normal drywall screws. Now, he had more screws and things than he could ever use...
But no nails.
On the junky work table in his garage, lit by a few candles, he stacked box after box of various screws and accessories—drywall screws mostly, of various lengths and thicknesses; deck screws; wood screws...
He found a box of finishing nails from when he replaced some wood trim last year, looked at it, and put it down.
Too small...
Digging through the backs of the cabinets, pulling out plastic tubs of other home improvement knick-knacks and placing them aside, Arthur finally let out a small sound of relief.
Reaching into the dark recesses of his cluttered storage, he pulled out an old cardboard box full of 3 1/2 inch framing nails...
“Perfect!!” Arthur exclaimed in the darkness.
The nails must have been left over from his carpentry days!
They were collated—linked together for use in a nail gun—and they might be a little short for some of the wooden barricades he’d have to nail to the studs around the windows, but they would work.
“I’ll definitely have to hit a hardware store tomorrow,” he said to himself. “Or the next day.”
In the morning, no matter what happened tonight, he would have to go out again and find Sheryl and his sons...
He had to.
Things were about to get really crazy. Houses were already burning. People were looting and attacking other people all around him as he rode from Dublin and Academy back home.
Was that just this morning?
“Fuck...” he said, carrying the box of nails, a pair of gloves, a pry bar, and a hammer inside.
He paused to also grab a big, flathead screwdriver.
Not to mention the fact that there were fucking zombies roaming around...
“Really?” he said. “We’re just going to call them zombies?”
Why not? he thought. They sure looked like zombies—aside from the weird and terrifying melted eye sockets and blue fire eyes...
He put the nails on the table and headed upstairs with the rest.
They sure acted like zombies. Undead creatures from the movies were fiction. But most monsters and legends and things were based on stories from the past, roots of some kind in reality, right??
Arthur didn’t know where the hell they came from, but he just shot three of the bastards not long ago.
They were real alright...
Using the screwdriver and the hammer, carefully carrying a candle along and laying it gently in the carpet, Arthur began tapping the retainer pins out of the door hinges of the upper bedrooms and bathroom.
There were two windows in the front room, and one in the kitchen. Those were exposed to the front side of the house—exposed to the street. The three front-most windows would need the most reinforcement. There were two ground-floor windows in the den downstairs in the back of the house, one in the bathroom, and one in the extra bedroom there, but those led to the backyard, which was enclosed in a six-foot fence.
Arthur doubted that the zombies would stay out of the back yard if they were trying to get inside from other peoples’ yards, knocking down fences perhaps, but the ones he killed earlier didn’t seem very smart. They were more like stereotypical mindless undead. Those creatures probably wouldn’t go into the back yard without a reason to do so...
Stereotypical except for the eyes, he thought.
“Yeah, except for the eyes,” he said aloud.
So he had—what? Four doors up here? There was also the folding closet door in the kids’ room...
Front room first, he thought.
It would be dark soon...
Working quickly but being careful not to knock over the flickering candle, Arthur moved the doors down to the front room, one after another, then went back into the kitchen to grab the nails...
He was glad he found those...
If Arthur had to spend the whole evening boarding up windows by turning screws with a handheld screwdriver, his arms would have been so sore by the end of it that he wouldn’t be able to defend himself!
Arthur laughed, and broke apart a collated line of nails, sticking several in between his lips.
Holding his bedroom door across the larger front room window with his body, Arthur held the first nail into place, and swung the hammer...
Arthur was just starting on the last window downstairs—the one in the third bedroom, which they had fashioned into Sheila’s sewing and crafts room—when he heard a scream from outside.
It’s time, he thought. They’re back...
The nail in his hand was only half-sunk into the wood.
He needed more time...
With the doors from upstairs, along with other random pieces of scrap lumber in the garage, Arthur was able to secure the front of the house pretty good. He even took the time to fill in the other empty spaces around the horizontal-laying doors with 2x4’s and such. With the other doors and the pieces of closets, he reinforced the back yard’s ground windows—maybe about 75% as much as he did with the front of the house. Arthur could still see the night sky through the glass in between his fortifications.
All that was left was this window, and he cannibalized a door from downstairs to cover it up.
But now the zombies were back, and he wasn’t finished!
He stared at the nail in his hand. The candlelight glinted off of the head of his hammer...
Four nails was all he needed for a minimal job. He should do more, but four points in the studs would at least make the door stay in place...
But the monsters would hear him hammering!
Arthur looked back at the craft room’s door, which was covered in a decorative, girly cloth organizer that Sheila made. It hung on the hollow, cheap door like some sort of flimsy shoe rack.
If he left the window undone, and stayed quiet from here on, he could close the door at least.
Would that work?
If the creatures sensed him inside, and were actually trying to get in...
Arthur imagined multiple zombies pouring in through the unprotected window, after shattering the glass, all pounding and pushing up against that single closed door...
“Fast,” he said through the nails hanging from his lips. “Do it fast...”
Arthur hammered i
n the first nail. He hammered in the other three, then stepped away from the barricade to listen...
A couple of gunshots popped off in the night somewhere down the street.
There was a distant scream, and a much closer hissing yowl of an animal nearby that made Arthur jump in the darkness...
That wasn’t an animal, he thought.
Taking the hammer and the candle with him, Arthur closed Sheila’s door for good measure, and briskly made his way back upstairs to the kitchen. He put down the hammer and shoved the nails he was carrying back into their box on the table.
With his ears perked, Arthur suddenly realized how hungry and thirsty he was...
The door to the garage was still open...
The space on the other side of the doorway was pitch black.
Arthur’s heartbeat picked up when he suddenly heard two pairs of feet running past the outer garage door...
Running!
Two pairs of shoes slapping the pavement and crunching through rocks and gravel...
Arthur found himself stuck, standing over the kitchen table, staring at the utter darkness of the garage, through the doorway from his kitchen...
He listened, and heard another pair of feet scraping the asphalt as someone sprinted by...
He didn’t hear the labored breathing and panting he expected; didn’t hear the whines and blubbering of living people running for their lives...
His throat burned...
Arthur’s eyes were glued to the pitch black garage as he heard his heartbeat grow in his ears, getting louder ... faster ... louder...
“Close it,” he whispered to himself.
Shaking his head and stirring himself to motion, Arthur walked quietly across the room to the door and tried to close it gently...
Instead, the door swung too quickly on its smooth hinges, and slammed shut with a boom!
Arthur gasped and froze.
He listened in the silent darkness, the faint glowing light of the small candle on the table sending shadows flickering across his kitchen and dining room walls...
As if in a bad dream, Arthur heard the sounds of several feet beating the ground as a group of people ran up to his house!
Not people, he thought. Zombies.
It was amazing how much he could hear through the exterior walls with no noise from compressors, his HVAC system, and other miscellaneous sounds that were normally present during—
The big front window shattered, its glass splitting and tinkling, stabbing Arthur in the chest with a jolt of fear!
“Shit!!” he whispered. His hand flew to the Glock at his side, but he paused, looking for the shotgun.
Arthur scooped the long, black weapon up from the table and flicked the safety off.
The creatures were outside, snarling and hissing. Fists thudded against Arthur’s wooden barricades. Claws scraped at the wood. More pieces of glass tinkled down to the rocks outside and into the window frame...
Arthur could hear the outside world much more clearly now.
Where were his extra shells? Were they still upstairs? How many did he still have in his pocket??
The creatures on the other side of the window made wet, gurgling noises, hissed, and growled like no human being ever could. Sending chills up his back and covering his arms with gooseflesh, the monsters’ sounds didn’t make sense to Arthur. It wasn’t like he could say that they sounded like rabid dogs, snarling and insane with rage. The vicious hisses and yowls didn’t sound like any animal Arthur could image, but every time one of the things pounded against the wooden defenses behind the broken window, the booming thud vibrated through his body and made him weak in the knees.
The light!
With a gasp, Arthur swooped down to the table and blew out the candle, casting the house into total darkness.
He was terrified.
Arthur was trying not to piss himself as the monsters growled and hissed and pulled and slammed into the barricade. He crept with his shotgun across the dining room and into the front room where he could see the damage—see the creatures trying to get in...
Thud, thud, thud.
After a while, the faintest amount of light from the night sky—as overcast as it was—slipped in through the cracks in the wooden reinforcements around the windows.
Putting his back to the drywall opposite the broken window, Arthur sunk down to sit on the carpet, keeping the shotgun trained on the handful of zombies that were trying to break through. He could see the shadows of their forms through the cracks of night sky, and occasionally saw the pinprick blue lights of their terrible eyes flash past in the darkness...
Arthur clenched his eyes shut, then opened them again, desperately trying to see the bead sight of the shotgun in near pitch-black conditions...
If the monsters broke through, he honestly didn’t know if he’d be able to even stand up again...
Thud, thud, thud.
They banged on the bedroom door that was nailed into the studs on either side of the broken window. He couldn’t see it in the darkness, but he could imagine their nasty fingers trying to punch through the spaces in between so that they could push and pull...
He heard their fingernails—or claws—scratching at the wood.
Thud, thud, thud.
Closing his eyes again, Arthur thought about Sheila and the boys. He imagined their faces, and thought about them lost in the darkness of the chaotic city at night, surrounded by looters, then ... these things...
Arthur’s eyes welled up with tears, and he felt them roll down his cheeks.
He looked at the broken window, and saw a steady pair of glowing blue eyes staring right back at him through the crack in between the door and the 2x4 above it, burning steadily in the darkness like two tiny, blue LED lights...
Thud, thud, thud.
A woman started screaming across the street—terribly! Another voice shouted, then Arthur heard a man scream as well, his pitch rising until it was a disgusting terrified plea. Animalistic sounds and growls rang out in the air.
Suddenly, the zombies at his window stopped their assault, and disappeared, their sprinting feet scattering Arthur’s landscaping rocks and slapping on the pavement as they dashed away...
Arthur reached up and wiped the tears from his face, and held the shotgun up again.
The screaming didn’t last long.
And they didn’t come back—at least not for a while.
Arthur shifted his weight and sat more comfortably up against the wall. Looking around in the dark, he remembered that there was a chair against the wall next to him. He pulled it with his left hand until it was in front of him, and laid the shotgun’s barrel on it as a rest, still facing the window.
He heard several more of the creatures over the next couple of hours, running by, letting out random snarls and what seemed like heavy breathing as they passed...
Did zombies breathe? He thought.
More glass broke here and there over the night in the neighborhood. Sometimes he heard gun shots, sometimes screaming—sometimes both.
The zombies ran rampant as time passed.
Arthur had no idea of how many there were out there, but they were like wild dogs, running around, alone or in small packs, from one target to another.
And they were fast.
The creatures sprinted through the night like athletes!
But Arthur stayed quiet, kept the house dark, and they didn’t come back...
Arthur didn’t notice when he fell asleep, but as the night went on, the terrible attack on the neighborhood—the sounds of the monsters tearing his neighbors apart—eventually started to meld with silky, smothering nightmares about his family ... out there...
Needing him...
They needed him...
12 - Kayleen Lugo
Portland, OR
Space.
Stars and black expanse. Ethereal clouds of color drifted around clusters of gas bodies in distances around her that were so large as to be meaningless...
But she was alone...
There was something—a large force that smothered her mind, something that Kayleen couldn’t see or smell or touch—all around her.
In the silence of space, surrounded by an incomprehensible amount of stars, Kayleen floated in nothingness, her legs drawn in against her chest, her arms wrapped around her knees, and she listened with her mind’s eye to the blues and purples and bands of gold that flowed around her lonely human form.
The Weave relaxed and contracted around her like an invisible jellyfish the size of a planet...
The heavy bands of gold flexed and spun around her.
Kayleen was its heart.
As the bands started to fall upon her, connecting her to the invisible, pulsing form that existed like an entire world around her, Kayleen saw a spark of gold appear from the black space dead ahead...
It could have been a few feet away—it could have been a football field away!
But it was a single, bright and shining golden sphere, maybe the size of a golf ball...
And as Kayleen breathed in and out with the flexing bands of gold, the gold sphere grew. With each breath it grew, pulse by pulse—reflecting the colorful and distant light and gradients of the universe—until Kayleen gasped, and eight thin spikes burst out from its form!
It was suddenly a large golden sphere—shimmering in the starlight and solid like a chunk of dense metal, with eight lengthening and flexing spines extending, reaching out, curving, growing larger and longer...
With each breath Kayleen took, the large golden figure swelled, contracted, and expanded again, until it started to resemble ... a spider?
Gleaming spines elongated and segmented, and were suddenly great, arachnid legs tipped with vicious blades, and the golden sphere, now as big as a manhole cover, warped and distorted until Kayleen could see a thorax. A thin abdomen grew out from behind its rear legs.