Eaters

by Michelle DePaepe

  “Cheryl and I will take first shift. If everything stays quiet, then we’ll switch out.”

  He showed Kyle and Claire the master bedroom and told them that they could rest there while they were waiting for their turn at watch. As they went in and shut the door, Cheryl envied them. She wished with every fiber of her being that Mark was still around to endure this nightmare with her, and keep her safe.

  The voice in her ears startled her. I am here with you. I’ll always be here with you… She talked back in her head. It’s not the same. Your ghost isn’t good enough.

  In the living room, she saw that Aidan had pulled all the guns out of the duffel bag and laid them on the big pine coffee table. He was busy checking each one and loading it.

  “You going to keep that shotgun, or you want the AK back?”

  Mark’s gun. I want Mark’s gun back. She held her hand out for the AK.

  Aidan picked it up and bumped the magazine with the heel of his hand to make sure it was securely loaded then handed it to her.

  “You know,” he said, pausing from his task, “I’ve always had this fantasy of living off the land up here. Winters would be rough. But I figure I could hunt and fish, grow a garden.” He looked up at her, locking her eyes. “If things go from bad to worse, you could stay here with me.”

  She held his stare, unable to process what he was suggesting. She couldn’t just slip into a new life with another man just like that. Of course, she’d already exchanged her life for a stranger’s. Less than a week ago, she was working in an insurance office, daydreaming about her Caribbean honeymoon plans with Mark. Now, she was effectively widowed, holed up in a cabin with three strangers, wearing an oversized combat uniform and a butch hairdo, holding a powerful rifle, and mentally prepared to blow the fucking head off of anything that tried to harm her. Life had truly changed on a dime. But she wasn’t prepared to tell Aidan that she was ready to set up house with him. There was still her family in Arizona to think about.

  “Thanks,” was all she could say. “I’ll think about that.”

  He smiled then loaded a clip into a handgun. “That’s good enough for now.”

  She remembered that he’d lost someone he’d loved too and that it probably helped him to imagine starting over. She realized that in some way, she was his life raft as much as he was hers.

  A few minutes later, he showed her to her post, a rocking chair by the back window where she had a view of the clearing and the blackness of the trees beyond. He took his post by the front window where he could see if anyone came up the drive.

  She watched the last bit of orange and pink sunlight over the treetops die off like the last coals in a fire pit.

  Night. She didn’t want night. In the daytime, it would be easier to see someone stumbling out of the trees with hungry dead eyes. In the dark, they could sneak up on you; one minute a shadow, the next, an army of teeth.

  Aidan had told her that the nearest neighbor was two miles down the road. The cabin seemed so isolated; they might as well be in the middle of the wilderness.

  Who would be around to help if the night turned against them?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cheryl’s chin kept falling into her chest. She was definitely jealous of Kyle and Claire, asleep in the bedroom. At least they’d had rest on their camping adventure over the last couple of days, snuggled in their tent, blissfully unaware of the events unfolding around them.

  Every few minutes, Aidan said something from across the room. He rambled on about a dog he used to own, rock concerts that he’d attended, the peach pies that his mother used to make. Some of it she heard, some of it she didn’t. There were definite hazy moments where she lingered somewhere in between consciousness and dreamland, blurring his stories into Eaters devouring rotten fruit, devouring musicians…and dogs.

  She was in that land of poppies and terrors when she felt a tickle on her cheek. She bolted upright, grabbing her gun from her side.

  “It’s just me, darlin’.”

  Her heart didn’t slow down at the realization that it was Aidan kneeling next to her. “What are you doing?”

  “Just trying to wake you up without scaring you. I guess I blew it.”

  “Is my shift over?”

  “Yes. I’m not sure how much of your shift you were awake for, though.”

  She shrugged and yawned with a small stretch. “All quiet on the western front?”

  “So far.”

  A loud thump sounded from the bedroom.

  Cheryl jumped out of her chair. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know.” Aidan raised his rifle. “Maybe, one of them fell out of bed.”

  “Well, it’s their watch. We should go check on them and wake them.”

  They crept over to the bedroom door. Aidan knocked softly, and Cheryl said, “Kyle, Claire…you awake? It’s time for your shift.”

  There was no reply.

  Aidan knocked louder. When there was still no response, he motioned for her to step back, then he threw open the door.

  There was a man leaning over the far side of the bed where Kyle lay. His filmy eyes were glowing like a cat’s, reflecting the light from the hallway. Cheryl gasped when she saw the blood around his mouth and realized that he had been eating Kyle’s neck. He’d gone straight for the jugular, choking off Kyle’s breath before he’d even had a chance to wake up and scream.

  Claire was still asleep on the near side of the king-sized bed. She was lying on her side, turned towards them and away from the horror scene just inches away from her back.

  Aidan cocked his rifle and fired.

  At the sound of the blast, Claire sprang up. Her doe-like brown eyes searched frantically as they sought to adjust to the dim light and find the source of the loud noise. Her eyes locked on their silhouettes in the doorway. Then in slow motion, like a video replay, she pivoted around…and screamed.

  The shot had just grazed the head of the Eater, a dead man with sparse blond hair and an open black and blue flannel shirt. He had a tall, strapping physique. Terry Bradshaw, Cheryl thought. A dead Terry Bradshaw. Blood glistened from his chin all the way down to his chest. At the sound of Claire’s scream, he lunged over the bed for her with one hand and let out an agonizing moan when his hand couldn’t quite reach her.

  She scrambled backwards and fell to the wood floor with a thump. Her mouth formed an oval as she screamed again and again, piercing, bloodcurdling screams that seemed to slice through the air and chop it into fragments of reality.

  Aidan fired again as the Eater abandoned its meal and started to come around the bed towards the sound of the earsplitting noise. This time, the shot hit him just above the temple. He twisted sideways and fell back a step from the impact, and Cheryl saw that he was missing an ear.

  Claire curled into a ball, whimpering at their feet as the Eater came towards them again. Aidan cocked his gun again and held it up, pointing straight between his opaque eyes. “Pete, stop!”

  But, Pete didn’t stop. With blood dripping down the side of his face, merging with the gore on his chest, he lunged forward towards Aidan, who suddenly seemed frozen.

  His blackened gnarled hands were inches away from Aidan’s gun when Cheryl fired a staccato of rounds into his head. The first few seemed to disappear into his forehead, vibrating his head like a bell. But the last of the burst made him totter backwards. He fell over the corner of the bed and rolled to the floor.

  Cheryl saw the bright red stain on the wall behind him, a flattened jellyfish with tentacles dripping down over the logs. “Holy…” she said, surveying the carnage as Claire jumped up and ran out of the bedroom door. A second later, there was the sound of retching in the hallway.

  She turned towards the door to go after her, but Aidan grabbed her arm.

  “Don’t. We’d better figure out how he got in first.”

  “What happened to you? You froze up.”

  Aidan shoved the body on the floor with his boot, checking for signs of life. “I k
new him. He was my neighbor, Pete Myers. A helluva guy. He saved my life a couple years ago when we were ice fishing and I fell into the lake.

  Cheryl shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  “How’d he get in?”

  “I don’t know. I checked the closet when we got here, and under the bed.” He stepped over the body and went towards the small bathroom.

  “Oh.”

  “What is it?”

  “Come look.”

  She stepped into the bathroom behind him. There was a small rectangular window, made of frosted glass that opened with a crank. It was open.

  “How in the hell?”

  “That’s so small. I don’t see how he could have—”

  “Sheer tenacity. He somehow managed to squeeze his way through, probably greased by his own blood. Must have taken him awhile.”

  She saw the dark stain running down the wood underneath the window, and the streak across the tile where he’d dragged himself towards Kyle’s sleeping body. Sickened, she turned around to leave the bathroom and found herself facing what was left of Kyle. His eyes were frozen open, like he’d been startled awake and immediately silenced by the first stab of teeth choking off his windpipe. So much of the flesh had been eaten away from his neck and upper chest that she could see the thin column of white vertebrae underneath. It made his head look like some horrific lollipop on a stick.

  “Where did Claire go?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, covering her mouth in case bits and pieces of her pasta and beans came up. I’ll go check on her.”

  “Grab some of that leftover wood from the kitchen, will ya? I’m going to board this up. I never would have thought someone could get in through here.”

  Cheryl walked away, stepping over Pete’s corpse to get out of the bedroom.

  In the hallway, she looked left and right, but there was no Claire. There was only a mess on a throw rug where she had lost her dinner.

  Poor girl. She is probably going to need therapy for the rest of her life after this. What was worse? Knowing that someone you loved was going to die as you left them behind, like she’d felt when she left Mark to his fate? Or, having someone you love die right next to you? They both sucked, but she decided Claire’s tragedy sucked worse.

  Cheryl hugged one arm around herself, partly to comfort herself and partly because there was a chill in the air. She had goose bumps, despite the fact that her camouflage shirt had dried hours ago.

  “Claire?” She walked into the living room. “Cl—”

  The front door was wide open.

  Claire’s silhouette was just beyond it, standing on the deck, backed by the moonlight.

  “Claire!” Cheryl yelled as she started to run towards her.

  But she stopped just before the open door.

  Claire wasn’t alone.

  Beyond her, there was a strange line of shadows just beyond the deck railing.

  They all seemed to move forward at the same time. It wasn’t a coordinated movement; it was more like group think—ants marching together in a jerky line. She couldn’t see their faces, but she could hear their grunting and gurgling, and picture them as one vile mass of rotten flesh, advancing with their mouths wide open.

  She grabbed for Claire’s arm but missed as it seemed to float away from her grasp. The group was on the steps now, moving upwards with swaying limbs. She could smell them. Human garbage cans. Rotting things seeking to fill their bottomless hunger.

  “Claire, we gotta go in NOW!”

  The young woman had a grip on the railing and wouldn’t let go as Cheryl tried to pull her off. She looked like she was in a trance, staring at the chunky moon in the sky, almost full, except for the large bite taken out of it.

  “Claire!” she screeched.

  How many rounds did she have left? She’d popped about a dozen into quarterback Pete. If the magazine held thirty…

  She decided that she didn’t have enough to take on this crowd that numbered twenty? Thirty?

  “Claire, goddamnit!”

  Five feet away now.

  She wrapped one arm around Claire’s waist and pulled.

  Four feet…arms outstretched with gnarled fingers…reaching…

  She couldn’t budge Claire from the railing. “Please, Claire!”

  Three.

  Cheryl ran back inside and slammed the door behind her.

  Claire had done it on purpose—committed suicide. Cheryl couldn’t blame her after the realization that her husband had been murdered as she lay sleeping next to him. But what an awful way to go.

  She backed away from the door, not wanting to hear the sounds of screaming…or eating. When she heard neither and realized that she could only hear the shuffling of feet and grunts, she couldn’t help imagining Claire still standing at the railing, silently enduring it as they surrounded her and began to eat her. Cheryl had seen how horrific the attacks could get when she had been holed up in the sandwich shop. They attacked like starving wolves, gouging out big holes of flesh with their teeth, ripping away brain tissue and guts, and devouring them with gusto.

  She kept backing up. She tripped over the edge of a rug and nearly squeezed the trigger of her gun hard enough to fire it up in the ceiling. When she tried to call for Aidan, his name choked in her throat. She jumped when she felt a hand on her back.

  “Where’s Claire?”

  With her own silent scream locking her voice inside, Cheryl started to raise her hand to point. Before it raised halfway, there was a blow on the door. She felt Aidan jump along with her.

  “They’re out there,” she whispered.

  “Claire?”

  She shook her head as the door began to vibrate with a shower of blows.

  “How many?”

  Her eyes fluttered shut for a second, forcing her to visualize the number of shadowy figures against the moonlight, the hunch-backed, limping forms coming up the deck. “I don’t know...two dozen...maybe more.”

  “Okay,” Aidan said, running his left hand over the top of his head, and clutching his shotgun with the right. “Shit. That’s a lot.” He took a breath. “Okay, Plan A is we shoot as many as we can and defend this place.”

  Cheryl felt like she’d lost control of her body. Every limb felt numb, and her eyes were frozen, wide open and dry—not blinking.

  Mark’s ghost piped up from his silence. Cheryl? Cheryl? Are you with me? You’ve got to stay in the game.

  She snapped back. “What’s plan B?”

  “We fucking run.”

  He turned and walked a couple of steps towards the kitchen.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I still need to board up that window. It’s a weak spot.”

  The door shook and caved inward, perilously close to busting through the deadbolt. “Will the door hold?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I built this place to withstand wind and cold, not monsters.”

  “What do I—”

  “Stay here. If anything gets through, shoot it.”

  Aidan ran to the kitchen to get the wood, and Cheryl stood rooted to the spot, standing a few feet away from the coffee table, where there was still a stash of guns on top of the array of American Iron and Field & Stream magazines.

  Hey little piggies. Let us come in, or we’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your house in.

  That voice wasn’t Mark’s. It was the devil’s minions speaking in her head. They had something else to tell her too.

  We’re coming to get you, Cheryl.

  Not funny. Her knuckles tightened on the gun, turning white. Then her head turned as she heard a thump on the front window that Aidan had been using as a lookout post earlier.

  Barbed wire? No bear ever came through it, but somehow Dead Terry Bradshaw managed.

  The thumps started to come in rapid succession now, beating on the door, the walls, and the window. Fingernails raked down the glass and clawed at it. She didn’t have to part the d
eer print curtains to know that the Eaters on the other side were pressed up against the glass with their rotting cheeks and cocktail onion eyeballs, licking at it with their black tongues.

  Aidan ran by her with a hammer in one hand and a pile of wood in the other. Two seconds later, she heard pounding coming from the bathroom. It was little comfort to know that he was in there plugging that hole when the entire cabin was simply made of sticks, like in the little pigs’ story.

  As the din of the Eaters outside grew louder, she wondered what they were going to do. If they were up somewhere high and safe where they could look down and pick them off, one by one, it might be possible to kill them all, but inside the cabin, they were vulnerable. It wasn’t a matter of if they had to run, it was a matter of when. The thought of running through the forest, trying to weave through the dense trees with a horde of hungry Eaters on their tails was terrifying. Even if they had a head start, they’d be finished after the first inevitable trip and fall. Cheryl imagined how awful it would be to be eaten alive, feeling teeth ripping away her flesh, and knowing that her bones would be licked clean and then scattered all over the mountainside, ravaged further by scavenging raccoons and other creatures.

  Running seemed futile. She liked the first idea better. If they could just get up on top of the cabin or high up in a tree where they could shoot from above like snipers…

  Then she realized that she didn’t know if the Eaters could climb. Forward—towards food—was their only motion that she had witnessed. It did seem possible that they could take a tree apart one handful of bark and splinters at a time.

  Through the din, she heard another noise that she didn’t like. It sounded like a large CRACK near the window. Were they yanking off the barbed wire and pulling at the wood?

  Ohhh, she really wanted to be with Aidan. Thinking about needing as much firepower as possible once they got up to their higher spot, she started throwing the guns and ammo on the coffee table back into the duffel bag. After it was filled, she picked the bag up and heard another loud cracking sound. She looked towards the window and saw bloody fingers poking through the wall underneath the window ledge.