by Sam Sisavath
Keo got up from the floor and looked for a weapon.
What weapon? He was inside the bathroom of a cheap motel room, in a part of the country where the only people who came here were either lost or looking to play hooky from marriage. Or, in his case, had just met an attractive blonde at an impromptu stop.
There weren’t any weapons. Or at least, nothing he would take with him into battle and feel good about.
He finally settled on the stainless steel tension rod holding up the shower curtain. It popped loose with little effort, and Keo swiped off the curtain rings. The rod was adjustable, so all he had to do was twist it and push inward, turning a seventy-two inch stick into a three-foot long weapon.
He gave it a couple of practice swings, pleased with the whip-whip sound it made as it sliced through the air. He would have liked something more lethal—a gun, maybe—but beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially ones hiding inside a bathroom in their boxers.
Delia was watching him. Keo couldn’t tell if it was with admiration, fear, or pity. Maybe a little of all three. “Are you really going out there?”
“I have to.” He crouched in front of her. “I have to find out what’s happening out there. I want you to stay in here, and whatever you do, do not open the door for anyone but me. At least for tonight. If I don’t come back—”
“Keo…”
“No, Delia. This is important. If it’s not me, only open the door for the cops. Understand?”
She nodded uncertainly. “Just…be careful.”
“Absolutely. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”
He smiled at her, and she tried to return it but came up painfully short. Keo couldn’t help but feel guilty about bringing her here. Where would she be now if he hadn’t picked her up in town? At home, probably. Maybe somewhere else with one of the locals. God knew there had been plenty of them hitting on her, but for whatever reason she had decided he was the guy she would go home with. If it weren’t for him, she would be anywhere but here right now. She would likely be safe and he would be on his way with his week-long vacation.
Live and learn, pal. Live and learn.
He stood up and kissed her on the forehead. “Sit tight.”
She grabbed onto his hand with surprising strength. “Be careful, Keo. God, please be careful. I don’t want to be in here by myself.”
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
She let go of his hand and leaned back against the toilet seat, closing her eyes. He watched her for a moment and saw the barely noticeable rise and fall of her chest. If it weren’t for the fact she was only wearing her bra, he might not have been able to detect that she was still breathing at all.
She’ll never survive the night.
Gotta get her to a hospital…
He moved with urgency to the door and put one hand on the doorknob. He leaned forward and listened, slowing down his breathing so he could focus completely on the other side of the door. There was nothing to listen to. No movement that he could detect, no sounds that he could hear.
Did it leave? Am I that lucky?
He waited another minute.
Then another…
There was nothing. Just a big fat nothing.
Daebak. Maybe I am that lucky. Maybe it really did leave…and took all of its friends with it, too.
You willing to bet your life on it?
One minute became two…
…then two became five…
Keo looked back at Delia. Her eyes were still closed and the bright lights reflected off her wet face, as if she were asleep under water. Her skin looked paler than before. If he didn’t know any better he would assume she was dead, but her chest still rose and fell. Barely.
Keo turned back to the door.
He took a breath, then pinched the lock and twisted it silently in case someone (something) was listening in on the other side. He gripped the doorknob tighter and readied the three-foot steel rod in his other hand. It would have been nice if he had a gun instead of a lousy metal rod. Then again, since he was already daydreaming, why settle for any gun? Why not go all out and daydream about an MP5K?
Another breath. Deeper this time.
This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.
He twisted the doorknob and jerked the door open, stepping outside all in one smooth motion. He was raising his makeshift weapon to swing before he had even completely cleared the doorframe.
Darkness and silence, except for his own heartbeat hammering in his chest.
There was nothing in the room. The creature was gone, leaving behind broken glass and splatters of black blood along the wall, mattress, and carpeting. Even in the semidarkness, the blood looked unnaturally lumpy.
He twisted the lock on the other side of the doorknob, then giving Delia’s (impossibly) still form a final look, closed the door back up and didn’t take his hand away until he heard the soft but solid click as the latch slid into place inside the strike plate.
Keo moved through the room, careful to walk around the bloodied glass shards on the floor. Besides wearing only boxers, he was also barefoot. The possibility of bleeding to death out here from a glass cut made him slightly queasy.
There was just enough moonlight spilling through the broken window to light his path around the debris. He walked past the bed and remnants of the lamp. The front door was still closed, the chain lock in place, which meant the undead thing had left the same way it had come in.
Keo stopped at the window, flattening his body against the wall. The motel wallpaper was cold against his bare back, and he longed for clothes. That would have to wait, though. He peered out into the world outside, saw the concrete sidewalk, then the parking lot beyond that. There had only been a dozen or so vehicles when he first arrived last night. They were still out there, including his Ford sedan rental, sitting under large bright pools of light from the lampposts.
There was light, and silence, and no movement.
Where is everyone?
He remembered the screams and gunshots from earlier. There were others at the motel. Hell, they were probably looking out their windows right now wondering where everyone was, just like him. Right?
Maybe…
Keo tiptoed to the other side of the bed where his clothes were still in a pile. He put the rod down within easy reach, then pulled on his pants and T-shirt. He had to look for the socks, finding them under the bed. He then grabbed his sneakers and shoved them on, all the while keeping his eyes on the window, expecting the creature to return at any moment.
“Psych!” it would say. “Fooled ya!”
But it didn’t return. Like the last few minutes, the only sound Keo could hear was his own breathing. Was he breathing a little harder than usual? Impossible. This wasn’t even close to being the first life and death situation he had been in.
Keep telling yourself that, pal.
He opened the nightstand drawer, pocketed his wallet and car keys, and grabbed his watch. He thought about picking up the Bible and seeing if it said anything about unkillable black-eyed creatures from the pits of hell, but decided he probably didn’t have that much time to waste. Besides, the last time he actually read the Bible was…well, it had been a while.
He was putting on his watch when he heard it.
Car engines!
Keo snatched up the rod and jumped on the bed to get to the other side quicker. He was almost at the window when he saw not one, but two trucks blasting up the highway, their headlights slicing through the darkness. He glimpsed figures in the front and more clinging to the backs of both trucks.
Seconds after the trucks appeared, the darkness around the motel parking lot came alive. They had been there this entire time, he realized, hiding (waiting) in the shadows, avoiding the lamppost lights.
He was prepared to see one or two of the same hairless black-skinned things that had attacked Delia and him, but not five—no, ten—maybe two dozen of the creatures emerging out of the blackness along the corner
s of the lot and from the motel rooms around him. Three dark figures flashed by the window inches from his face in a blur of black skin and clacking bones. He hadn’t heard doors opening, so he assumed they had used the windows to exit those rooms.
They moved with preternatural speed, with an almost effortless motion that seemed incongruent with their malformed shapes. They bounded across the asphalt parking lot, slipping in and out of the pools of light in pursuit of the vehicles, like rabid dogs chasing something they didn’t have a chance in hell of catching—
The pop-pop-pop of gunfire exploded across the night sky, coming from the direction where the trucks had gone. More than one weapon firing simultaneously, judging by the constant rate of fire.
Had they actually caught up to the trucks? They were fast, but he had a hard time believing they were that fast. Likely, there were other creatures already out there that had intercepted the trucks farther up the road. Of course, that introduced a whole new breed of problems, like there being more of the creatures than just the ones at the motel.
Keo shivered slightly at the thought and wished he knew for certain. But that was beyond his control at the moment, and all he could do was stand in the darkness and listen to the chaos. It went on for a while, but inevitably the gunfire began to slowly fade as the action continued on without him.
Eventually he couldn’t hear the gunshots anymore. He wondered if the people in the trucks had successfully eluded the pursuit. Or maybe they were all in a ditch somewhere along the highway at the moment, possibly dead. Or worse. Maybe like…
Delia.
Keo stepped away from the window and hurried across the motel room one more time. He picked up Delia’s clothes—a too-small miniskirt and red top—and headed back to the bathroom.
He knocked on the door as softly as he could, just loud enough for her to (hopefully) hear, and whispered, “Delia, it’s me.”
He waited for a response.
After about five seconds, he tried again, knocking and whispering a bit louder this time. “Delia, it’s Keo.”
He waited five more seconds, then ten…
“Delia?” Slightly louder again. “Delia, it’s Keo. Open the door.”
Ten seconds became fifteen, then twenty…
Keo looked back at the window, at the parking lot outside, trying to guess how much noise he could make without attracting attention from whatever was still lingering around out there or in the surrounding rooms. It was so quiet (so goddamn quiet) that any little sound would travel. He could even hear the buzzing from the lampposts, something he had never noticed before in all the years he’d spent in motel rooms like this one.
He knocked on the bathroom door again.
Too loud. Way too loud. Anyone with ears would have heard that.
“Delia, open the door.”
Sixty seconds…
He tried the doorknob, but it wouldn’t move. He put his shoulder against the door and gave it a push, but he had no leverage without a running start. Keo was just a shade over 180 pounds of lean muscle, so breaking down the door wasn’t the problem. The racket that would result, though, would be.
He tried again, even louder than the previous times. “Delia, it’s Keo. Delia? Can you hear me?”
She was either dead or dying in there. That was the only explanation. She had looked terrible when he last saw her. If she had succumbed to her wounds, there was nothing he could do. But if she was still alive and needed help…
Dammit.
He stepped back and dropped her clothes to the floor. He gripped the steel rod in one hand and zeroed in on the doorknob and the area around it. Keo took a breath, then delivered a solid kick with his tennis shoe that caved the doorknob in with one blow.
The door swung open and Keo lunged inside.
She wasn’t at the toilet anymore. Delia had somehow crawled into the bathtub, where she now lay curled in a fetal position. Bloody handprints covered the smooth porcelain sides, and the towel that was supposed to be wrapped tightly around her arm was instead in her lap. She looked unconscious and her face, covered in the familiar thick film of sweat, seemed drained entirely of color.
Keo did his best to close the bathroom door back up, but the strike plate was damaged and the doorknob hung off one end. He managed to close it anyway but didn’t delude himself into thinking it would hold if the creature—or God help him, creatures—came. If he was lucky, they had already fled after the trucks and there were none left to hear him break down the door.
If he was lucky.
He waited against the door, listening for the sound of running feet. If they were coming, they were taking their damn time.
After a few minutes, he abandoned the door and rushed over to the tub and leaned over Delia. He already knew what he was going to find even as he reached for her neck. Her face told him everything, and the lack of a pulse confirmed it.
He sat on the tub and stared at her for a moment. Even in death, she was striking. Her eyes were closed and she looked peaceful, as if she had simply gone to sleep. He picked up the shower curtain and placed it over her face and body, then sat for a moment and contemplated his next move.
He looked back at the door.
What was that saying about the world coming to an end with a whimper? There wasn’t even that much at the moment. He would have settled for a little whimpering, anything but the oppressing stillness and silence from the dark motel room beyond the open door.
What the hell is happening out there?
CHAPTER 3
The bathroom light flickered off around four in the morning and didn’t come back on again. When Keo poked his head out the bathroom door, he wasn’t surprised to see the same darkness in the parking lot beyond the broken window. It was the first clear indication that this was a much wider problem than just something to do with a skeevy motel at the edge of nowhere.
Great. So I guess I’m not the only one SOL.
Of course, knowing that didn’t really improve his lot any. He was still stuck in a motel bathroom with no communication with the outside world.
And now the lights were gone.
He spent the next few minutes turning over the few available options he had in his head. The motel room didn’t have a corded phone, and he didn’t have a cell phone on him. The only people who ever needed to get in touch with him was the organization, and he had a beeper for that. When you worked for the kind of people who employed him, you were summoned—you didn’t converse about the job. The problem with that was a beeper received messages, it didn’t send one out.
So what was left?
Delia.
Her cell phone was likely still in her purse outside. He had seen her using it before they left Garrity’s, where she worked, and again during the short ride to the motel. Even if the power grid was down, cell towers had backup batteries, so there was a chance the phone could still be useful.
Keo picked up the steel shower rod from the counter and, keeping low, moved out of the bathroom and toward the dresser nearby. Her purse was exactly where he had last seen it, on top of the dresser next to the TV. It was a small white thing that somehow, like most women’s purses, managed to hold an astounding amount of everything. He picked it up, shuffled in the darkness over to one of the nightstands, and collected his beeper before heading back into the bathroom.
Back inside, he remained near the partially ajar door. He couldn’t lock it anymore (or fully close it, really), but if something was coming at him, he preferred to see it as soon as possible. Without the bathroom lights, the entire motel was one big dark room anyway, whether the bathroom door was closed or not.
Keo turned on his beeper first. It powered on, the LED display blindingly bright. No messages. Disappointing, but not unexpected. The organization only contacted you when they wanted you back at work, and it had been a long shot to think this had something to do with them.
He pocketed the beeper, then dumped the contents of Delia’s purse on the sink counter and rifled through
them. He found her iPhone among the lipsticks, tissue paper, gum, a box of mints, and a dozen other things for which he couldn’t figure out their uses.
He powered on the iPhone. Her lock screen background was a duckface selfie of Delia in her waitress uniform. When he slid the icon to unlock the phone, it asked for a password. But Keo didn’t need to know that because the emergency function was still available, as it was on every phone. The problem was the zero bars at the top left corner of the screen. Would the emergency number work without bars? He had no idea, but there was only one way to find out.
Keo pressed the emergency button.
He didn’t have to wait very long for his answer. The phone wouldn’t connect. For some reason, that didn’t surprise him. No bars meant the local cell tower was down. Either his was the only one affected, or all the towers were down everywhere. Not that the answer mattered. Either explanation resulted in the same thing: a big fat nothing when it came to contacting the outside world.
He shoved the phone into his pocket with the beeper. If nothing else, the screen was bright enough that he could use it as a flashlight if he needed one.
Keo glanced down at his watch: 5:16 a.m.
*
While waiting for morning, Keo closed his eyes briefly and didn’t open them again until he felt the warmth of the sun through the (mostly) closed bathroom door. The room had brightened up noticeably, and waking up to the natural glow put him at ease, and for a moment—just a moment—he entertained the idea that last night was just one big bad dream.
He glanced down at his watch: 6:02 a.m.
The heat was building outside, which meant sunrise was very close. Thirty minutes, he guessed, maybe sooner. He hadn’t been in the state long enough to know for certain, but it was November, and down South that usually meant sunrise between six and seven, complemented by a very early nightfall. Yesterday, the sun had set well before six in the evening.
He spent the next few minutes trying to recall the map of the surrounding area in his head. If he knew where everything was, he could better formulate a plan of action. Right now, his priority was figuring out what the hell had happened last night, and that meant gathering information. He needed cell reception for that. The Internet, a news channel, even a working radio station would be a boon at the moment.