The pile of furniture heaved behind me, greeted by a bray of victory from the partially open doorway. I was being pushed to the center of the room. I loaded my shotgun and fired twice, dropping one wolf that had clawed its way out of the kitchen.
Someone pulled me down as a wolf leaped from the pile of chairs and lockers covering the door. It was Pettis. He shot the thing as it landed.
“Come with me,” Pettis said, clutching my arm.
I followed. The room was dense with smoke and the smell of carnage. He pulled me toward the far corner, adjacent to where the line of lockers had been. Behind us, I heard a tremendous crash as the last of the barricade was breached.
“Get in,” he said.
I saw nothing, what looked like blank wall. The roar and stink of death behind me grew louder—
He shoved me and I hit what should have been the wall, but it suddenly opened and I kept going. I felt like Alice, tumbling through the mirror into the looking glass world. I saw blank faces staring at me. Then there was darkness; my head was forced down by a low ceiling. Someone cursed at me under his breath.
“Sit,” I was ordered.
I squatted. Someone was directly under me. Impatient hands moved me to one side and I sat. Cold metal met my back. I reached up; I could just touch the ceiling from a sitting position, making it a scant four feet above me. I touched gingerly out to my right; there was a warm body a few inches from me, not as tall as I. Over its head I felt the wall, very close. On the other side was the person who had sat me down. I imagined the wall was close to whoever it was. Maybe four feet wide. Six feet long. I thanked God I wasn’t a claustrophobic.
“Anyone else left?” the body to my left whispered in a hoarse British accent; it sounded like Doc.
The one to my right, a young voice—the girl Amy—whimpered in reply.
“Don’t worry,” Doc said, reaching over me to touch the girl. “He’ll find her.”
The sounds of battle raging outside were greatly muffled.
“Doc?” I ventured. The body to my right told me in a fierce whisper, “Quiet.”
There was a grating noise and then blinding light in front of me. I smelled blood. The light was blocked by someone crouching. A figure fell onto me and darkness returned. I felt wetness on my arm. I sucked in my breath in sudden fear, but Pettis’s voice said calmly, “She wasn’t bitten.”
“Where the hell are we?” I asked.
“In the morgue they built into the shelter. The door is solid steel. The wolves don’t know it’s here. I suggest we don’t talk. Whatever air we have now is what we have until morning.”
“Cowboy,” Doc’s low, patient accent came from beside me, “are you sure they won’t smell Moira’s blood?”
There was a pause. “There’s enough out there to keep them busy all night.”
“Are you quite sure she wasn’t bitten?” Doc had softened his voice, but it still sounded clinical and cold.
There was a longer pause. The girl’s hand passed over me to stroke her mother’s face, which lay in my lap.
“It’s all right, Cowboy,” Doc said. The clinical tone had bled away. “I assume the others are dead?”
“Yes. No more talk,” Pettis answered.
Intimately close, each alone with his thoughts and nightmares, with the sounds of distant, muffled death filtering into our steel tomb, we waited.
CHAPTER 14
Elegy
We waited forever.
In our morgue, we breathed shallowly. My own lungs settled into a rhythm that, after a time, became my sole attention. My head grew light, but still I puffed in, puffed out, like an emphysemic.
At one point, I drifted into sleep, and dreamed. In the dream my son and wife beckoned me from the doorway of our house. I was walking up the steps, toward them, and behind them, in the house, I heard what sounded like the television on, very loud. It was Jimmy Rogers’s voice, shouting in his confident drawl, “We need Proctor and Baines real bad. Proctor and Baines.” I heard him spit, and then the television got very loud and then very soft, and I distinctly heard the click of it being shut off. My wife and son stopped smiling. I had nearly reached them. Their smiles returned, only they weren’t smiles anymore. Their mouths were filled with long teeth, and their faces became indistinct, pushed out, longer. As I reached to embrace them they took me and began to tear at my flesh with their teeth and hands…
The dream ended, and I became aware of my breathing again. In, out. In, out. Only now, the puffing was ineffective; I needed more air. I felt like a drowning man reaching for a receding surface.
Shallow breathing was turning to gasping around me. Pettis’s daughter labored for breath; Doc, whose lungs must have been filled with years of nicotine stains, was doing no better.
“What…time is it?” Doc gasped.
A round smudge of fluorescence glowed into life directly in front of me; in its light I made out Pettis’s features greenly. He let go of the button on his watch and the green light disappeared.
“Four-sixteen.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Don’t talk,” Pettis ordered.
We gasped on. I began to hallucinate, dreaming awake. I saw wolf faces floating before me, mouths snapping like steel traps, howling, laughing…
Finally, at five o’clock, Pettis announced, “I’m…going to open the door for a minute.”
“Yes,” Doc begged.
Pettis shifted in the dark, grunting. A long vertical crack of light suddenly beamed into the room. Sound flooded in—something snarled in the distance.
Pettis grunted again; the crack doubled in width, doubled once more.
There was now a one-inch line of the bomb shelter visible. I saw nothing but bright light that hurt my eyes, something dark in the distance that looked like the top of a locker.
Cool air brushed my face.
I felt as if someone had given me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A luxurious breath of oxygen climbed down my throat; my lungs screamed Yes! Yes!, pushing sour carbon dioxide out.
“Oh, God!”Pettis’s daughter suddenly cried.
For a long time, in the coffin-like quarters we occupied, with the lack of fresh air, the nearness of human bodies, the cramping of my body, I had been unaware of the weight of Pettis’s wife on my lap. Her head had been cradled there, and she had not moved at all, except to cough once, soon after Pettis had sealed the door. I now put my hand to her face and felt coldness.
“She’s dead,” Amy Pettis wailed.
Doc’s hand went to her throat, seeking pulse. “Yes,” he said.
Pettis was silent. When he spoke he only said, “I have to close the door.”
Pettis shifted again, and the door began to close.
It stopped. Pettis cursed. There was a loud sound right outside our prison, and the door flew back, flooding us with blinding light. Shielding my eyes, I saw moving shapes, broken furniture—and a hulking figure that stood directly in front of us, screaming in rage, reaching in to pluck us like rabbits from a cage—
Pettis pulled the body of his wife to the opening and pushed it out of the bomb shelter.
“No!” his daughter screamed.
The thing outside wailed. The body was yanked savagely from Pettis’s hands. I saw the glow of the wolf’s yellow eyes, a patch of dried blood on the woman’s forehead, the cold blue gleam of her dead limbs, and then heard the terrible tearing sound of the wolf feeding.
Pettis jammed the door closed. His rapid breath, which he fought to bring under control, was mixed with the hitching sobs of his daughter.
“How…could…you…do…that!”
Doc tried to calm her, but she grew hysterical, lashing out over me to try to hit her father with her fists.
“How…could…you…”
Pettis leaned over me. I thought he was going to take her in his arms but instead he brought her face close to his and covered her mouth with his hand.
“If you’re not quiet, they’ll kill us all.”
Her sobs quieted. He let her go, and she fell back with a gasp. When Pettis pushed the button on his watch to check the time I saw her pull up into a ball, hands tightly around her knees, face turned to the wall.
“It’s five twenty-two,” Pettis announced. “If they leave us alone for thirty-four minutes we’re safe.”
For the next half hour we listened to the horrible sounds just beyond our door. More than one wolf had joined in the feed, and we all knew that when they were finished with Moira Pettis they would come after us.
For twenty minutes we were left alone. Then a crack of light appeared in the door.
Pettis threw himself against it, trying to hold it closed. Screams of protest and rage rose on the other side. Doc and I moved to help. The three of us raked our fingernails against the cold steel, trying to hold it in place.
The door was pulled open another half inch, A long sharp claw curled into the opening. The muscles in my arms were about to burst out of my skin.
“No, you bastards!” Pettis shouted, but the pressure was too great and the three of us were thrown back as the door flew open. A hulking brown shape filled the doorway, eyes wide with fire.
There was a deafening shot. The wolf threw its paws to its head. One of its yellow eyes burst, a flow of blood spattering us. There was another shot. I turned to see Pettis’s daughter aiming her .45 a third time as the beast collapsed in front of us, blocking the door. We pushed it out of the way as three other wolves fell on their dead, unmourned comrade.
And then there came a sudden change in the air. One of the wolves crouched back on its heels and sniffed. The other two paused in their feeding. They went back to their work, tearing huge chunks of meat from the corpse, the crude beginnings of a pyramid of white bones beginning beside them.
Again they became tentative. In our cramped space, Pettis and I added our own firepower to Amy’s, and two of the wolves went down. The remaining beast backed away, snarling with indecision, then turned and loped away.
Pettis looked at his watch.
“The Moon’s set,” he announced.
“Thank God,” Doc said weakly, his face ashen.
Pettis left our prison first. He checked the corners of the room. The barricade had been hurled aside, leaving a clear path to the doorway. He walked to the kitchen to check the hole in the ceiling.
“All clear,” he called.
I stumbled out, and behind me, Doc crawled out on all fours, stretching himself slowly up to full height, holding his back.
Amy had sat curled in her corner of the morgue, crying.
The floor was littered with stacks of bones. Moira’s skeleton, partially assembled, the skull fatefully left at the top of the ribcage, empty eye sockets staring at the ceiling, mouth pulled open in the scream of the dead, was one of perhaps fifty. Some were separated into neat pyramidal piles, others in haste had been left like the girl’s mother.
Pettis returned from the kitchen. His eyes rested on the remains of his wife. His face went blank. He crouched in front of the morgue opening.
“Come on, Amy,” he said, gently.
She sat unmoved, face away from him. He moved to go to her. Suddenly she struck out at him, scratching at him with her fingernails.
“You bastard!” she screamed. “Look what they did to her!” She pushed him back, out of the morgue, forcing his head down toward his dead wife’s staring, unseeing skull.
He let her do what she wanted. He stared into the skull’s eyes, then he stood and held Amy firmly against him.
She fought him, beating with her fists and crying. Then she collapsed, her arms going around him and holding him, her face buried against him.
“Oh, God, Daddy. Oh, God…”
“It’s all right, baby,” he soothed, stroking her hair. “It’s all right.”
“No it’s not!” She pulled her face away and looked up at him. “It’s never going to be all right! You knew what she was afraid of! You knew she wanted things just to stay like they were, with you and her and me! I know she was wrong—but do you know how scared she was that you would get killed helping all these other people?”
“I know, baby. I know.”
His daughter grew fierce. “Maybe she was right! Maybe we should have gone away together like she said, just the three of us, safe—oh, God…”
He pulled her head against him again, brushing at her hair. “It’s okay, baby,” he said. His gaze lifted to Doc, then to me. “It’s okay.”
His daughter continued to cry in the new morning, and all of us wondered if he was lying to her.
CHAPTER 15
Orders for the Day
We spent the morning clearing out wreckage in our bomb shelter. Except for Moira’s remains, which we buried, we swept the bones into a gruesome pile and carted them out to an alley behind the hotel. After clearing out the rest of the wreckage, we were left surveying what was left of our fortress.
“I wonder if we should bother,” Pettis said around noon, as we rested with warm Cokes from the hotel’s machine, which the wolves had partially destroyed and which we took great pleasure in breaking open. “Every night those bastards have done a worse job on this place than the night before. The doors I can fix again, and we can patch up the hole over the kitchen, but I don’t think we can stand another night like last night. They know we’re here, now they know about the morgue. I think we should move elsewhere.”
“You said yourself there’s no other place in Hopkinsville as defendable as this,” Doc stated.
“There’s the bank vault,” Pettis replied. “With only the four of us, air’s no problem. There’s no way they could get in.”
As they discussed our plight I sat on the floor with my head against the wall. My mind wandered. I was very tired. Suddenly I was drifting off to sleep. I saw my wife and son again, standing on the porch of our house; they began to smile the smile of wolves, and behind them on the radio Jimmy Rogers’s voice drawled, “We need Proctor and Baines, we need Proctor and Baines, damn it, Wyatt and Doc, get on in here—”
I sat up. The Coke I was holding spilled. I blinked the real world back into my eyes.
“Doc, is your name Baines?” I asked.
He looked at me dispassionately. “Why, yes.”
“Do you know someone named Wyatt Proctor?”
He and Pettis looked at one another. “Of course.”
I told him about Jimmy Rogers and the radio.
“That crazy jackass,” Pettis said, brightening.
“Mr. Blake,” Doc said, “I don’t think you realize the service you’ve just performed.”
“We’ve been waiting to hear from Rogers for two days,” Pettis explained. “They were supposed to send a helicopter to take us to Edwards Air Force Base. That was the last we heard from them before the phones and power went dead. I spent the whole first day looking for a radio that worked. Every single one had been broken to bits. I was out in the desert looking for the chopper when I spotted you yesterday.”
Doc and Cowboy exchanged thoughtful looks.
“You think Rogers got things set up at Kramer?” Doc asked.
“Hell, I wouldn’t put anything past Jimmy. Edwards must have been overrun. He may have lost his copter, but—Jeez,” he said, smiling with new purpose, “we’ve got work to do.”
It took the rest of the day to do it. We ate, then Doc and Amy got together everything we would need from the hotel while Pettis and I went shopping for the rest.
The street in front of the hotel was brilliantly lit with sunlight. I began to walk boldly out into it when Pettis took my arm. “There,” he said. Across the street, in the shadow between two buildings, was the crouched figure of a wolf.
Pettis raised his rifle. The beast retreated warily into the alley.
“It’s the full Moon,” Pettis said. “They’re getting bolder during the day.”
We proceeded with caution. We went first to the hardware store. While I stood guard out front, Pettis entered the gun room. After an int
erminable time, he let out a whoop of triumph and emerged with two shotguns, boxes of ammo, and what looked like an Uzi.
“I knew the bastard had one of these,” he said, holding the machine gun up. “He was with us in the bomb shelter the first night and kept talking about it. But he wouldn’t tell me where it was. Stupid son of a bitch was more worried about having an illegal firearm than he was about staying alive. It was in a false bottom in his desk.”
At the front of the store we gathered some tools, flashlights, and batteries. We also took a long length of plastic hose. Without explanation, Pettis took a few packets of flower seeds. Next we went to the supermarket where we had met the day before. We loaded everything from the hardware store into a cart and rolled to the door. Pettis checked the clip on the Uzi.
“Wait here,” he said, going in.
Through the front windows I saw him go down the dairy aisle and move back toward me up the next. I saw movement above him, up on the top shelf. He crouched and whirled. A staccato burst of fire leapt from the Uzi. A small torsoed wolf fell dead in front of him. He went on. I heard another burst of gunfire at the back of the store before he reappeared, signaling me in.
We loaded the cart with cans and boxes. For a few moments I allowed myself to become a child again, on a shopping spree. There was a perverse sense of delight in taking whatever we wished, and I indulged myself in boxes of cookies and packages of candy bars. By the time we had finished, the cart was nearly spilling over. We threw some unspoiled fruit into it before rolling it out onto the street.
We pushed the cart toward the outskirts of town. Just before Hopkinsville melted into desert we left the cart and turned down a narrow alley between two houses. On the right, about halfway down the alley, we passed a second-floor patio. The door leading to the patio was ajar. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door move. I turned and fired at it.
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