From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set

by J. Thorn

  When we drove back to fetch our comrades, both Ram and Chetan were silent. They had learnt firsthand that shooting someone, even a decayed Moreko, in real life is a tad more difficult than blasting enemies in a video game. It took us two trips to get everyone to the guest house. At least we now have a place to sleep and as soon as I finish this entry, we’re going to start cleaning up our new luxurious, stinking and blood-splattered accommodations at the Taj Mahal.

  Day 136. Cleaning up.

  We spent all day cleaning up our new home. There are twelve rooms, which means more than enough space for all of us to get some privacy. We have four single males, me included, two single women and the rest are families. We gave the larger rooms to the families and the rest of us took a single room each. That still left a couple of rooms that I converted into a ‘recreation room’ and a ‘dining room’.

  The only problem of course was that every corner of the Inn was covered in filth and gore. It looked as if a couple of the occupants had holed up in here before being overrun by the Moreko. Of course, we hadn’t added to the charm of the place with the two Moreko we had shot in the lobby. On the positive side, the large water tanks on the roof were nearly full – so we all indulged ourselves with short baths. But that luxury was to be granted only after we had cleaned the place up. We spared the kids, but every adult was busy cleaning up the mess. We burned the Moreko bodies behind the Inn, and even after everything we had been through, a couple of people puked at the stench. I can hardly blame them.

  You will not believe what a bath, even one consisting of a couple of mugs of water and no soap, can do to a man. I suddenly feel almost human again. I’ve got to go now – we have dinner in ten minutes. Our meal will be frugal, some fruits and a couple of cans of soup that were left in the hotel pantry. But sitting down at a table for a meal with other people is something that used to be a distant memory for me. For someone who once claimed to be a loner, I am surprised at how much I’m looking forward to the company.

  Day 136. Insomnia.

  Everyone else is sleeping, but I can’t. Every time a branch moves outside in the wind, I rush to the window, my rifle ready. A few minutes ago, I could have sworn I heard someone walking on the road outside. Either I’m losing my mind, which is an entirely plausible hypothesis, or we are not alone.

  Tens of thousands of people became Moreko in Gangtok, and they all have to be somewhere, so it’s hard to hide without the risk of bumping into them. We have a fair bit of firepower now at our disposal, but given only Negi can shoot straight due to his stint in the National Cadet Corps, I wouldn’t want to be besieged here by a horde of Moreko.

  An hour ago I finally couldn’t take it any longer and woke up Negi, telling him that we needed to put people on guard duty. Chetan and Ram are now our de facto combat veterans, so we roused them, and we decided on rotating through two-hour shifts, so that everyone could get some shut-eye, but we’d have someone watching outside at all times. In theory that means I can sleep, but knowing that Chetan is now on guard duty, and remembering how terrified he looked when he encountered the Moreko in the lobby, I can’t get to sleep. I think I’ll go over and keep him company.

  Day 137. The perils of civilization

  Why is that that the moment you give people the trappings of civilization their basest instincts come out? When we had been huddling together in a cave in the forest, people had not bickered about anything, since we were just so focused on staying alive. One night under a roof and with comfortable beds to sleep in, and two of the women have had a fight over who uses water from the tank first, and Chetan and Pratik have argued over whether the can of soup they were sharing for breakfast had been split fairly.

  The most irritating thing was that they expected me to mediate. I’m not their frigging babysitter and I would have thought that when you’ve had the undead at your throat, you would learn not to sweat the small stuff. So here I am, sitting alone by the window, my rifle beside me, wondering how many more days of domestic bickering I can take before I go and invite the Moreko to feast on my companions.

  Day 138. Bored.

  One would have thought that I’d welcome safety, but truth be told, I’m bored. While we were out in the forest, the need to survive was enough for us to put up with each other. Now, I realize that I have little in common with the people around me. I feel like a total outsider. The families are busy amongst themselves and even those who don’t have families here have things in common – they talk about the people they left behind, the plans they have for the future. I have nothing to contribute to any of the discussions. My life was at a dead end even before I came to Gangtok on this assignment, and I had no plans other than drinking the next bottle of rum. My family, if I can call my ex-wife that, doesn’t give a damn about me, and I can’t blame her. I don’t mind just sitting by myself – I did that for three months in the bungalow, but it’s difficult to be totally alone in a house filled with people. If nothing else, the kids come over and ask me to play with them. That I don’t have a problem with. It’s the fights over who uses the clean towel that I just cannot take.

  So I did the one thing I do know. I called a meeting and tried to organize guard, scouting and scavenging duties. Everyone got the scavenging part. With the hotel pantry still holding several bags of rice, we will not starve for some time, but nobody was against going out to the nearby forest to look for fruits and animals to hunt. Where I was stumped was the resistance I got to guard and scouting duties. Two days of safety and they’re behaving like none of this shit happened. Negi told me that if we go out scouting too aggressively, we risk attracting attention to ourselves. I get that, but if we just sit here, we’re blind to what’s happening outside, and that can only lead to unhappy endings.

  Day 139. Domesticity.

  Now I know why I made such a mess of my marriage. I hate having to compromise with people. It’s hardly something to be proud of, but after all that’s happened, I owe myself that much honesty. That failing of mine is being sorely tested now.

  With so many people packed in this hotel and no entertainment, it’s inevitable that people will begin to rub each other the wrong way. Quarrels over meals are one thing, but this evening, one of the older men accused Chetan of flirting with his teenage daughter. Looking at the girl, I got the feeling that the attraction was mutual, but I wasn’t going to tell her enraged father that. Instead, I took Chetan aside and told him that like it or not, we were still in a combat situation and again, for better or worse, I was in charge. The first rule of combat is not to let personal issues complicate combat readiness. When he looked at me blankly, I told him I would shoot him between the eyes if there were divisions in the group on account of him. I suspect I severely dampened his libido.

  There was another argument over dinner. I don’t even remember what sparked it, but pretty soon Chetan and Ram were at each other’s throats. The last thing I needed was for the two young, fit guys I had been counting on to provide security to be fighting. Negi separated them, and I sat there, eating my dinner in silence. Mira, the mother of the girl who had been the object of Chetan’s affection, looked at me accusingly, saying that as the leader I should do something. I told her that I wasn’t good at dealing with domestic squabbles over who got more rice than his neighbor. She told me that what I called squabbles were part and parcel of civilized people living together and adjusting to each other. Clearly, I’m not cut out for civilized living.

  Everyone’s asleep now and Chetan is providing his guard duty of dubious effectiveness, since I can hear him snore. So I’m doing what old, bored soldiers do in times of peace when civilized people don’t have need for them. I stay awake, waiting for the time when I’m called upon to bare my teeth again.

  Day 140. 300.

  Do you remember that movie, 300? Spartans, all three hundred of them, all bare-chested with sculpted muscles and abs, facing off against thousands of Persian soldiers in a heroic last stand. They died to the last man, but inflicted such damage on the
ir attackers that the Persian Empire’s progress was halted. Our situation is not quite as dramatic, but no less dire. I have with me not three hundred elite warriors, but a handful of civilians, only a couple of whom I can count on to shoot a gun. We are faced with not thousands of enemies, but considering our own pitiful army, no less dreadful an opponent.

  The first Moreko appeared just before noon. I was the first to see him – a thin fellow, with his scalp flapping around his blood-covered face. I immediately told the others to keep quiet. Floppy, as I began to call our stalker, hung around, and as the day went by, I kept praying he would move on. I guess my prayers were not enough to stop a child crying.

  One of the kids slipped and shouted aloud. His mother hushed him, but it was too late. Floppy screamed and I dropped him with a round to the chest. When he began to get up, I shot him through the head. All well and good, but he clearly had not been alone. Within seconds, a dozen more Moreko appeared and stood around Floppy’s corpse. I was tempted to open fire, but at a range of over a hundred yards, I seriously doubted anyone would score a hit other than by a minor miracle, and even if I got all twelve of them before they reached the hotel, more of them started appearing. They shuffled closer slowly.

  Now, as the light fades, there are at least fifty of them outside, no more than fifty meters away. I’ve got all the adults packing weapons – the men with the rifles and the women with the handguns we captured from the troopers. The kids are all locked in an upstairs room. If we didn’t have the kids with us, we could have tried to fight our way out and get into the jungle, but with so many kids and at night, there’s no chance of them making it through the Moreko. My orders are explicit – I fire if the Moreko charge and everyone else opens up only when the Moreko get within ten meters. I think we have a good chance of getting them all, but it’s a tense standoff, and I realize now that what we had taken to be a safe haven could well turn out to be a death trap. Tonight none of us gets any sleep, and I just hope we survive to see tomorrow morning.

  Day 142. Enemy of an enemy.

  I skipped a day, but then I was kind of busy trying to stay alive. I am evidently still around, as are all but two of my companions (but more on that later). However, I’m not sure we are any safer than when we were facing off against fifty Moreko.

  Before I get ahead of myself, here’s what happened. As they always say, the best laid plans seldom survive first contact with the enemy. Our plan, if one can call it that, was essentially to hope we got the Moreko before they got into the hotel. As it turned out, the two guys I was counting on to hold the fort along with Negi and myself let us down.

  The Moreko were more than a hundred meters away when Ram opened up with his rifle. It goes without saying that he missed, since the recoil jerked his rifle up and all his shots went cleanly above the Moreko’s heads. I was so pissed off that I slapped him with the back of my hand. But then Chetan panicked and started firing, and everyone opened up. I screamed at them to stop, but once the shit hits the fan, you can’t help but be splattered.

  The Moreko seemed to be enraged and began moving in faster. By now it was too late to do anything else, so I shouldered my rifle and began picking them off. I was firing on single shot and scored six hits before I shouted at my comrades to concentrate their fire on one Moreko at a time. With each of them trying to pick off different targets, almost all their shots missed, which wasn’t unexpected given most of them were firing a gun for the first time. So I changed my role from shooter to also being a spotter. I’d pick off one Moreko and then shout out the target to aim at, and everyone would open up on the one target till I switched to the next.

  So I screamed out to get the big, fat guy in a yellow shirt, and soon enough, that Moreko was down, hit by a dozen bullets. Next was the old woman with a hand missing, and her head was blown apart by a direct hit. All this time, I kept on picking off my own targets. Our hit rate had improved, but there were still more than twenty Moreko standing and they were now within twenty meters of us.

  The women, who had exercised much better fire discipline than the men (what is it about men that the moment they get a gun in their hands, they think they’re bloody John Rambo?), now came into their own. I must confess, I was impressed. I had fought for my country and for the men next to me, and seen how both patriotism and loyalty to one’s brothers in arms motivated soldiers. This was the first time I had seen mothers fight to protect their children.

  They were calling out targets and coordinating their fire, taking down one Moreko after another. Some of them had found the recoil hard to manage and had improvised brilliantly, putting pillows on the window sills and resting their arms on them to stabilize their aim. Mira had, without anyone saying so, become their de facto leader and was encouraging the others on, correcting their fire and in general kicking Moreko ass. I remember when I had joined the Army all the debates that used to rage about whether women should be assigned combat roles. If those old generals had been around to see how these women were handling battle, I suspect they would have had a very different perspective on the matter.

  I was putting down Moreko at a decent clip and by now the misguided rifle fire of our men was also beginning to take its toll. For a few seconds, I thought we’d be able to mow down all the Moreko well before they got close enough to be a threat, and even if a handful made it to the hotel door, we could finish them up close with handguns and if needed, knives.

  That was when some of the older kids upstairs started screaming about more of the undead coming in from the other direction. I rushed to the kitchen window and saw a dozen Moreko come into view, walking towards the hotel. I took out two of them and called for Negi to get a few people to the back, but even as I got ready to fire again, I had a sinking feeling that we were going to be overrun.

  A couple of the men lost their nerve on seeing the Moreko come within a couple of meters and abandoned their positions, moving upstairs to try and hide. That started a chain reaction of panic as people scrambled back from the windows and tried to get back up. Negi was gamely holding his ground and was shooting away, but other than Mira and a few women, most of the others had lost their nerve. I was trying to rally them, but it was a losing battle.

  Chetan screamed as a bloodied hand grabbed his gun and another pair of hands closed around his neck and pulled him out the window. Ram was trying to hold onto him when another Moreko reached in and bit his arm. I shot the Moreko’s head off with a handgun but it was too late for Chetan. I couldn’t see it, but his screaming told me just how much pain he endured before he died.

  Now that we had lost the ground floor, I asked everyone remaining to move back up – at least we could try and hold the Moreko at the stairs. Ram was looking at me with an expression of pure terror. I still remember how he looked at me and then at the blood pouring out of the wound on his arm. The Moreko were pounding on the door, and given that the architects of the Taj Mahal Inn hadn’t exactly invested in high-quality construction material, I fully expected it to give way in no time.

  Ram was still crying and asking me to help him when he fell back and began convulsing. I was stepping back up the stairs when he got up, his eyes yellowed and his teeth bared. He was about to rush the stairs when a single shot took him down and then three more struck him, finishing the job. I turned to see two of the moms, pistols in hand. And they say men are the more ruthless sex – you haven’t seen ruthless till you see a mother fighting for her children.

  Anyways, the door gave way and the Moreko streamed in. I shot one but realized I could never shoot all of them in time. That was when the Moreko nearest the door were torn apart by an explosion, showering me with dust (and blood and body parts). I tried to blink away the dust and saw the remaining Moreko being cut down by automatic fire. I joined in, as did my companions from the top of the stairs, and it took about two minutes for us to wipe the Moreko out. Then I got my first look at our unlikely savior, a young man dressed in the uniform of the Chinese Red Army.

  We are now at t
heir base, some four kilometers from the hotel, and everyone is sleeping in tents provided by the Chinese troops after some very welcome hot soup. I’ve cleaned myself up but I can’t seem to sleep. The last time I thought someone had saved me, I landed up a slave in Bharti’s camp at the mercy of his troopers. What is in store for me now?

  Day 143. Chinese checkers.

  We had our first group meeting with our rescuers. To my discomfort, my companions had spread the word that I was the leader, and also that I had been in the Army. Sitting on the ground near the officer who had led our rescue, I thanked my stars that nobody around knew that I had killed Chinese soldiers before. I’m sure that little piece of trivia would not exactly have endeared me to my new hosts.

  As it was, Lieutenant Teng seemed like a pretty decent guy. He spoke impeccable English and joked about how one upside of the epidemic was that he no longer had to keep seeing his friends’ inane status updates on Renren. He echoed my thoughts when he said how being a soldier had kept him alive, even though he had hated being conscripted into the army after college during the tensions with Taiwan. His ambition had been to go backpacking around the world before he found a job in software.

  In short, for someone I would have under different circumstances been ready to kill, he was pretty likeable. The kind of guy I wouldn’t have minded sharing a beer with, and certainly far preferable company to the half-educated megalomania of Bharti and his cohorts.