“They told me not to come back.”
“But where are they? Do you remember? Can you show us?”
“I…I need my gun.”
“Forget this guy,” Lennox snapped, releasing him.
“We can’t just leave him out here wandering around,” Lana said.
“Then you babysit him.”
“We can’t keep running,” Duck said.
“That’s what I tried to tell folks,” Hopps mumbled. “Ain’t nowhere to go.”
Duck scoured the street, focusing first on the burning General Store and the flames shooting high into the night sky, and then scanning the remaining dark buildings. “We’re only a couple hours from sunrise. I say we find somewhere to wait it out until the light of day.”
“If we were going to do that we could’ve stayed where we were,” Lennox said, tension rippling up across her jaw.
Lana’s gaze came to rest on the hardware store, the dead body hanging in front of it, and the gas station next door. “This can’t be happening.”
“I need to get home,” Anita said softly. “Home, I—I need to get home.” She hugged herself as if cold, despite the humidity. “For the love of God why can’t we get the fuck out of this town? What is the matter with you people?”
“There may not be any home to get to anymore,” Duck told her.
“But why should we stay here? We have a car, let’s use it.”
“We don’t know what’s out there,” Duck explained. “Maybe in the light of day we can—”
“We may not even be alive in the light of day,” she reminded him. “The whole town’s gone crazy.”
“Could be the whole world’s gone crazy.”
“It’s your car,” she said, nudging Chris. “We have every right to take it.”
Lennox turned to her. “You’d strand the rest of us here?”
“You all want to stay here that’s your business. I want out. Duck’s car is back at his place, use that.”
“Listen to me,” Duck said, “and listen good. I’ve been in a world with no rules, a world lit on fire and bathed in blood, you understand me? I’ve seen what human beings can do to each other firsthand when all bets are off and the only order of the day is survival of the fittest. You tell yourself it’d take a long time, that it’d be a slow process before everything crumbles and people fall apart and start doing things they otherwise wouldn’t do in a million years. But it’s not like that. Blink of an eye, whatever you thought was civilized humanity is a fucking ghost and we’re right back in our caves.”
“Anita,” Chris said, gently taking her hand. “They’re right, we…let’s do what Duck says.”
“I’m so goddamn scared,” she said, voice cracking. “I can’t even think straight.”
“Can’t fuck your way out of this one, love bunny,” Lennox quipped.
“You’re one to talk,” Lana said.
Lennox turned to respond, but something over Lana’s shoulder caught her attention instead. “We need to get off the street,” she said, motioning toward the boardwalk. “They’re here.”
The others looked back.
A line of vague dark figures stretched the width of the boardwalk.
Unmoving and silent, the dead watched them through the drizzling rain.
35
As the dead congregated outside, continuing their silent vigil, the others fled to the abandoned hardware store, effectively blocked the one entrance but still had a good view of the street through the large front windows. They parked the Audi out back and took turns watching through a small window on the steel back door.
The remaining hours of night were surprisingly quiet. The storm was nearly gone, the thunder and lightning a memory, the rain reduced to a mist and the wind occasional and nowhere near as strong as it had been before.
They huddled near the back of the store and rode out the night. No one spoke, and eventually, people began to drift off from complete exhaustion. They may not have been sleeping, per se, but it was something similar.
Through the darkest corners of Chris’s mind, she came to him. The waif he remembered his sister to be walked quietly through the store and sat down next to him, unnoticed by the others in their pseudo-slumber, her nightgown stained and wrinkled and caked with mud, hair a mess, face dirty. Her throat was blackened, bruised where his hands had ended her life. Lacy took his hands in hers and smiled, and the moment he felt her touch Chris broke, weeping like a child and falling against her. She held him, this small and broken girl, and for just a few quiet moments, they were neither alive nor dead but in some gulf between the two, where none of what had happened or soon would mattered.
He fell away to deeper darkness, watching as his sister left him, walking away in the same direction from which she’d come, stopping only once to look back at him and wave.
At some point during the waning night hours, the dead had retreated. The front of the store was clear and there was no longer any sign of them on the street. Unlike the others, Lennox had closed her eyes for some time, but remained completely awake. Perhaps that was how she’d noticed what Lana was doing when no one else did. Very quietly, she’d slipped over to where Duck was sitting and taken the car keys from the floor next to him. And then, stealthily as she could, she moved to the back door of the store and slipped out.
The .38 in one hand and the combat knife in the other, Lennox followed.
Outside, the air was a bit milder than the night before. Night was barely hanging on, but dawn had won out. In moments, full daylight would rule.
Lana had closed the back door behind her when she’d gone, but as Lennox stepped through she left it open, and though the rough ground was murderous on her bare feet, which were already bruised and cut, she made no noise as she slid in behind her. “What are you doing?”
Lana jumped and spun around, the 9mm in hand. “Jesus,” she sighed, relaxing. “I could’ve shot you, are you out of your mind?”
“Going somewhere, Lana Turner?”
“It’s none of your concern, go back inside.”
“That car’s our ticket out of here if need be, so yeah, it is my concern.”
“I need to go back to my cabin.”
Lennox chuckled humorlessly. “Still jonesing for that cash, huh?”
“You’re talking about every dime my husband and I have.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you? The world’s over and you’re worried about some money?”
“I can’t just leave it there.”
“I bet you can.”
“We might need it, maybe now more than ever.”
“And we might not.”
“I’ll get it and be back before anyone even knows, so just—”
“Can’t let you risk the car.” Lennox moved closer. “Go back inside.”
“Oh, you’re giving the orders now?”
Lennox raised the .38. “Apparently I am.”
“Go ahead, badass.” Defiantly, Lana leaned her forehead into the barrel of the gun. “Do it.”
The two women stood staring at each other in the mist, neither noticing the eerie quiet drifting all around them.
With a quick backhand Lana knocked the gun from Lennox’s hand. As it flew away and bounced along the ground, Lana stepped into her and jammed the 9mm up under Lennox’s chin. “Don’t you ever fucking point a weapon at me!”
“Get off.” Lennox’s face, even at close range, seemed wholly void of emotion. “I mean it.”
The tip of the combat knife pressed slightly into Lana’s midriff.
For a long moment, neither moved nor breathed.
And then Lana very carefully lowered the gun.
“Go ahead and drop it,” Lennox said.
Lana complied.
“Now get back inside.”
“I need that money, Lennox.”
“Not if it means risking our lives you don’t.”
“I need that money.”
“Are you willing to die for it?”
&nbs
p; “Are you?”
From the doorway behind her, someone said, “Is that my gun?”
Lennox looked back, saw Hopps standing there pointing at the .38 on the ground like an addlebrained child. “Go get Duck,” she told him.
As Lennox turned back, Lana threw a punch that connected with Lennox’s chin. She dropped like she’d been shot, legs collapsing beneath her as she went straight down to the ground.
Lana bolted for the car.
Head spinning, Lennox scrambled onto all-fours. In her fall she’d dropped the knife, and searched frantically until she located it. Rising to her feet, she staggered after her and slammed both hands into Lana’s back. The force of the blow smashed her into the side of the car, and as she toppled away the two women began grappling across the small dirt lot in a frenzied and violent dance.
“Get her!” Hopps laughed hysterically, pointing at them. “Get her!”
The struggle seemed to last forever but had only taken a matter of seconds. Lennox eventually got the upper hand, overpowering Lana and pinning her against a nearby tree, holding her by the throat with one hand, the knife in the other, cocked and ready to strike. Their eyes, alive and crazed, never left each other.
“Do it!” Hopps screamed like a deranged fan at a sporting event. “Do it!”
The others knocked him aside and poured through the door, trying to make sense of what was happening.
Lennox didn’t remember much beyond that.
She didn’t know, for example, that Duck had screamed for her to stop, or that in the final seconds, Lana’s eyes had shifted and she’d seemed oddly at peace with what was coming, a surrender of sorts to the inevitable. And she had no memory of slamming the blade deep into Lana’s abdomen, then leaning into her and ripping the blade upward, unaware of how she’d even known to do that.
She never heard the screams of the others, didn’t remember a single one.
But she did remember Lana looking at her with an expression equal parts surrender and disbelief, as blood bubbled up over her bottom lip and ran across her chin. Her eyes rolled to white and she slid to the ground, the knife buried deep inside her.
And the sun…
Lennox remembered seeing the sun coming up over the trees and tops of the buildings. She remembered feeling oddly free and damned all at once.
Most of all, she remembered dancing to old 45 records and laughing with an abandon she knew she’d never experience again.
In all the confusion no one realized Hopps had picked up the .38, until, still laughing hysterically, he screamed, “Halt!” and fired.
The last thing to go through Lennox’s mind was a bullet.
36
Duck stood speechless, the shotgun in his hands still smoking; the sound the blast had made still ringing in his ears. A few feet away, Wendell Hopps lay dead not far from the two women.
In a matter of seconds, they were gone. All of them, gone.
He blinked away the blood and turned to Chris and Anita, who stood horrified and holding each other tight by the back door.
Neither the dead nor the strange winged creature had hurt anyone.
Only the living had killed.
And now, in the light of a new day, the dead slept and the monsters under their beds had vanished, leaving the living to their carnage.
Later, when the tears had ended and the shock had subsided and become a detachment necessary for survival and any chance at clinging to sanity, they found themselves in the deserted town square. A few buildings were still smoking but the storm had ended, apparently taking the dead and the strange creature with it.
They still hadn’t seen another human being, but they were there, hidden.
Duck, Chris and Anita stood quietly by the Audi a while, exhausted, filthy, bloody and devastated in more ways than they could even begin to comprehend.
“Are you sure you won’t come with us?” Chris finally asked.
Duck nodded sullenly.
“If this really is the Apocalypse it appears to be, it’s probably not any better out there,” Chris admitted. “For all we know, it’s worse. But that thing might still be here.”
“Back at Rae’s cottage,” Duck told them, “it could’ve killed me whenever it wanted to. It didn’t.”
“What about Rae and her children?”
“Rae was responsible for that. She said what was coming was even worse, that this was only the start.”
He grimaced. “My sister had visions of the creature years ago. She drew pictures, she—”
“It was here before we were. Probably be here long after we’re gone.”
“What do you suppose it wants?”
“Maybe it wants us to pay attention. Or maybe it’s like a mirror. Look long and hard as you want, the only thing you’re gonna find in it is yourself.”
“And maybe it’s responsible for all this.”
“I figure it’s like Rae said. It’s no different than the dead. It watches and waits. That’s what the dead do. The rest is the living. The rest is us.”
A faint breeze blew past, carrying with it the smell of fire and death.
“What will you do?” Anita asked.
“Live. Die. What else is there?”
Chris offered his hand. “Good luck.”
“And to you,” he said, shaking it. “God help us all.”
* * *
The Audi sped along endless stretches of empty highway, the wipers making intermittent passes every few seconds to clear away what had become a barely discernable misting rain. Before them loomed a vast gray horizon, the sun large and full in the sky but blanketed in haze, as if suspended behind a thin film of wax paper. The car’s air-conditioning saved them from the suffocating humidity outside, and being tucked away in their sealed car offered a sense of security, albeit a false one. Chris tried the radio several times. There was still nothing to hear but white noise, and neither his nor Anita’s cell phone had a signal. The .38 Duck insisted they take with them lay on the console between the seats, specked with dirt and blood. Neither touched it, even when they came upon odd debris they couldn’t immediately identify, the occasional body, or abandoned cars, trucks or SUVs left on the road, sometimes in the breakdown lane, sometimes in the middle of the highway, many with cracked windshields or blown out windows, doors left open as if their occupants had screeched to a stop then tumbled from the vehicles to flee on foot.
Alone with their nightmares, they rode in silence, neither speaking for a very long time. There seemed little to say, and yet, even in a world on the brink of total collapse, they remained people. Perhaps not exactly, precisely the people they’d been prior, but people nonetheless.
“I’m sorry,” Chris said softly.
“For what?”
“For not telling you earlier about Lacy, I—I’d buried it so deeply that I think in a way I’d convinced myself none it had ever truly happened.”
“Looks like that’ll be a handy skill from here on out.”
“Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“I don’t know what it’s supposed to be,” she sighed. “You’ll have to live with what you’ve done, Chris, nobody else.”
“I have lived with it. For most of my life I’ve lived with it. I still find it hard to believe I was even capable of it. I always have.”
“After the last couple days I’ll believe damn near anything.”
He frowned. “I’m also sorry about us, I…I’m sorry about everything that happened between us, Nita. Our relationship never should’ve gone there, I...”
Anita looked out the window at the forest beyond the breakdown lane. She wondered if anything was looking back. “We never did get a chance to figure out what it was, what we had.”
“Maybe figuring out what it wasn’t is enough.”
The quiet returned.
After a while she said, “This is how things end? It ends like this?”
“We don’t really know for sure what’s happening.”
“Does it matter
?”
“Of course it does.”
“Not if the end result is the same.”
“We don’t know for sure that it will be.”
“Yes we do,” she said. “That’s why I want you to take me home.”
“We’ll stop by your apartment. If it’s safe you can get some things and—”
“No. I want you to take me home.”
“Brendan may not be there, Nita, I—”
“Nancy may not be at your house either, but that won’t stop you from going, will it?”
“Look, I can’t just leave you in—”
“It’s not up to you.”
He looked at her.
“It’s not up to you,” she said again, barely a whisper. “OK?”
With a reluctant nod, Chris returned his attention to the road.
They drove for hours without seeing another living soul.
When they finally did it was just outside Portland. A man engulfed in flames ran across an overpass then dropped to his knees and collapsed while nearby, a band of teenagers watched. Below, a horrified and battered young couple shielded two children behind them, the man holding a golf club and shaking it at them threateningly as they drove by.
“We should stop and help them,” Anita said, though her tone was anything but insistent. “Children, there were…children…”
“We stop for nothing,” Chris answered, increasing speed.
“It doesn’t take long, does it?”
“What?”
“To lose what little humanity we have in the first place.”
“It’s too dangerous.” He slowed the car to swerve around a burning Jeep Wrangler tipped on its side in the middle of the road. Its driver, a woman, lay face down a few feet away in a pool of her own blood. Stripped of clothes and badly battered, the back of her head had been smashed to a pulp by some sort of heavy object. “We stop we die.”
Like sharks, she thought, cold, predatory, living to survive and doing so on pure instinct and necessity. No remorse or judgment, compassion or hatred, only the base struggle to stay alive. And if they stop swimming, they drown.
The Living and the Dead Page 21