by Sam Sisavath
Norris made a quick circle around Keo before joining his friends on the other side. Keo turned around to face all three of them.
Norris lowered his shotgun. “He’s not armed, unless you count the tire iron. Lower your weapon, Aaron.”
The man named Aaron hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“He heard my shots and ran over to help.” He eyed Keo for a second, then added, “We gotta trust somebody; might as well be him.”
“Do you have a name?” Rachel asked.
“Keo.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“John was taken,” Keo said.
CHAPTER 6
“The SUV. That’s yours?” Keo asked.
Rachel nodded. “We were on the I-20 when everything started happening. We heard about it on the radio and decided we should probably look for a place to stop for the night, just in case…you know.”
“Where were you headed?”
“Texas. Well, Santa Marie Island in Galveston. We were going to visit some family, maybe even stay there for a while.”
“Where were you guys coming from?”
“Atlanta. I had a job there until a few months ago.” She shrugged. “We were looking for a change of scenery, anyway.”
“We” was Rachel and her eight-year-old daughter, Christine. The girl sat on one of the big desks inside the police station, small legs swinging back and forth over the side. She ate enthusiastically from a bag of Doritos and hummed some random pop song he had heard on the radio a few days ago to herself.
Aaron, the other guy with the shotgun, stood at the window peering out through the bars, absently clutching and unclutching the Mossberg 500 in his hands. He wore slacks and a jacket, the pockets stuffed with shells. Every now and then he swiped at beads of sweat along his forehead, though he didn’t seem affected by the sun shining in his eyes. He had all the telltale signs of a man who hadn’t slept in the last twenty-four hours. Despite the stress spread liberally across his face, Aaron looked young. Early twenties, Keo guessed. Aaron lived a few blocks away and had arrived at the police station about the same time that Norris and Rachel did last night.
Norris looked in direct contrast to Aaron; he was calm despite the incident at the gas station earlier. The fifty-six-year-old ex-cop from Orlando, Florida, was at home with the shotgun, and if last night’s events had turned his world upside down, he didn’t show it.
“I saw shell casings in the parking lot,” Keo said to Norris.
“Wasn’t me,” Norris said. “We got here after all of that happened. It couldn’t have been too long, though; the blood was still wet then. Whoever was in here before us must have gone outside and didn’t come back before we arrived. They left the doors unlocked and we found the keys on the floor.”
“We came here because it was a police station, like you did,” Rachel said.
She sat next to her daughter, occasionally reaching over to flick at a piece of cheese or chip clinging to the girl’s pink shirt and dress. Mother and daughter both had blonde hair and blue eyes, and they clearly adored each other. There was no doubt Christine was going to grow into an attractive woman, just like her mom.
If she lives long enough to grow up, anyway.
“You have no idea what happened to the cops?” Keo asked.
“Dead,” Aaron said. His voice sounded hollow and drained. “Probably dead. I heard a lot of shooting. Must be dead.”
“You said there were reports on the radio,” Keo said to Rachel. “What were they saying?”
“Something about attacks in the cities,” Rachel said. “It was kind of confusing. I don’t think the news really knew what was happening. And no one was telling them, so there was just so much guessing, rumors…” She adjusted Christine’s hair, and the girl smiled back at her mother. “I didn’t want to risk it out there alone with just the two of us, so I decided to get off the main road and find a place to spend the night. Bentley was the first town we ran across.”
“She picked me up along the highway,” Norris said. “I’d lost my ride.”
“We weren’t the only ones who decided to take the first exit off the interstate,” Rachel said. “There was a big pileup and Norris was just walking along the shoulder. He looked friendly enough.”
“No, I didn’t,” Norris said, “but she was nice enough to give me a ride, anyway.”
Rachel gave Keo a pursed smile. “I took a chance. What about you, Keo? Where were you when all of this happened? Do you have any idea what ‘this’ is?”
“I was at a motel down the road,” Keo said.
“But you saw them, right?”
Keo nodded. “I saw them.”
“They’re not human. They can’t possibly be human.”
“They used to be.” He told them about Delia. “She was bitten by one of those things. It took a while, but she finally succumbed. That’s how it works, I think. They bite you, you die, and then you become one of them. For them to have done what they did last night—in one night—there had to be thousands of them spread out across the state when it started. They had to be coordinated, too. This isn’t some random thing that just happens. Last night was an orchestrated invasion.”
“An invasion,” Rachel repeated quietly.
“It must have been hell in places with big population centers. It would spread like wildfire and their numbers would explode exponentially every hour. One becomes two, two becomes four, four becomes eight…”
“Like a disease,” Norris said.
“A goddamn effective one, yeah. At least, that’s what I saw with my own eyes. I’ll leave it to the historians to come up with the fancy words. All I know is, don’t let them bite you and stay out of the dark.”
Rachel and Norris didn’t say anything for a while.
Finally, Norris said, “You armed?”
Keo held up the tire iron. “I got this.”
“We can do better than that,” Norris said.
*
Norris handed Keo a shotgun from a room at the back of the station. He would have called it an armory, except it wasn’t really one. It had lockers along the walls and a long wooden bench toward the front. There was a refrigerator in the back corner and an oak table in another. In the middle of the back wall was a weapons rack next to an ammo shelf.
Armory/employee lounge/changing area. Welcome to Boondocks PD ‘R’ Us.
“We were lucky the doors and windows had bars on them,” Norris said. “They couldn’t get in no matter how hard they tried, and damn, did they try. They were at it throughout the entire night and morning.”
“How many were there?” Keo asked.
“I don’t know. More than a dozen. Maybe two or three. Why?”
“Bentley is a town of 3,000.”
“Right. Where were the others.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe they were busy with…the other townspeople.”
“Easier prey,” Keo said.
“Yeah,” Norris nodded. “They eventually stopped about an hour before sunrise. I couldn’t figure out why, but I guess we now know. Sunlight.”
“Sunlight,” Keo nodded.
“You have any ideas why?”
“Do I look like someone who would know things like that, Norris?”
Norris grunted. “I guess not. We’re both out of our element here, aren’t we?”
“I think that’s a safe assumption, yeah.”
The shotgun that Norris handed him was a Remington 870, and there was one more like it still in the rack. Norris tossed him a box of shells, and Keo fed them into the tactical police weapon. It took seven rounds, and Keo put the rest of the shells in a pouch similar to the one Norris was wearing. Except for three shotguns left behind, the rack were empty, which was unfortunate because judging by the boxes of 9mm bullets and 5.56x45mm ammo still stacked on the shelves, the Bentley Police Department had assault rifles stored back here at one point.
Besides ammo, the shelf also had plenty of LED flashlights and two-
way portable radios. Keo and Norris grabbed one of each before heading back into the hallway.
The back room had a steel door, which made sense given the weapons inside. There was a deadbolt, but the door was left open when Norris had found it last night. The building was split into two sections connected by a hallway, with the offices, lobby, and jail cells up front, and the armory/employee lounge and a unisex bathroom in the back. They didn’t have any other windows except the ones in the lobby to worry about.
“How many cops were using this place?” Keo asked.
“A town this small?” Norris thought about it. “A dozen would be too many.”
“It looked like they had some pretty big firepower in there for a dozen cops.”
“Small towns and guns. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of those were their personal hardware.” They walked for a moment before Norris asked, “So, you’re what, Korean?”
“Just the kimchi half of me. How’d you know?”
Norris smirked. “You mean how did I know you weren’t Japanese or Chinese? I’ve been around, kid. Although I have to admit, I didn’t know they grew you Korean boys so tall these days.”
“My dad was a full-blooded six-five American serviceman,” Keo said. “As you can imagine, I’m a bit of a disappointment to him.”
*
Rachel was sitting on the desk next to Christine, turning the dial on a portable radio. She was only getting static and from the annoyed expression on her face, he guessed that was all she’d been getting for a while now. Christine, meanwhile, had started in on a new bag of chips, all of them from one of the vending machines in the lobby. Keo had seen the girl go through three bags already.
Keo sat down on a desk with a framed photo of a deputy crouched next to a little girl as she was eating ice cream. They seemed to be having a good time at a park or someplace with very green and well-cut grass.
“Anything?” Norris asked Rachel.
She shook her head. “It’s like there’s nothing out there. That can’t be true, could it? Shouldn’t there be something? The state? The government? Someone?”
“There should be,” Keo said. “Unless if what happened to us also happened to the rest of the country. In which case, there’s no help coming. At least, not for a while.”
“What about the phones?” Norris said. “Still not working?”
“Butkus,” Rachel said.
“What about out there?” Norris asked Keo.
“I saw a truck at the other end of town, but he didn’t bother stopping to swap war stories. Other than that, Bentley’s my first stop. I’m not comfortable telling you there’s nothing else out there, because I don’t know that for sure.”
“You said the sun kills them,” Rachel said to Keo. She had turned off the radio. “That they just…turn to ash?”
Keo shrugged. “I’m just a layman, Rachel. That’s the best way I can describe what happened to it.”
“And everything’s gone when this happens?”
“Everything except the bones.”
“What about the organs?”
“Those, too.”
“That’s weird.”
“Which part?”
“All of it, I guess.”
“We should—” Norris began, but he stopped and craned his head. “You hear that?”
Car engines.
“Yes,” Keo said, hopping off the desk.
“Aaron, what do you see?” Norris asked.
“I can’t see anything,” Aaron said, peering out the window.
“Come on,” Norris said, running off.
Keo followed him to the back of the hallway, where Norris climbed up some ladders he had pulled down from the ceiling. When he reached the top, the ex-cop unlatched a metal square hatch above him and pushed it open to reveal a cloudless sky on the other side. Keo climbed up after him and onto the rooftop of the police station.
Norris crunched loose gravel under his sneakers as he jogged over to the edge. He looked out, his eyes shielded from the harsh glare of the sun by the brim of his cap. “Two trucks. Coming fast. Looks like we’re going to get company.”
“You think they’re headed here?”
“It’s a police station, kid. It’s the first place civilians go in times of emergencies. Just like we did.”
Norris was right. The two vehicles began to slow down as they neared the station before turning into the parking lot. Keo glimpsed a lone figure in the red truck leading the way, and two more in the trailing black vehicle. They stopped behind Rachel’s Durango SUV, but the passengers didn’t climb out right away. Smart move. It wasn’t hard to spot Norris and him on the rooftop, along with the shotguns slung over their backs. He remembered how close he had come to getting shotgunned in the face less than an hour ago.
The man in the red truck climbed out first, throwing both his hands in the air. Early twenties, wearing dirty work jeans, steel-toe boots, and a blood-stained white T-shirt. He had short brown hair. “Don’t shoot!” the man shouted up at them.
“No one’s shooting you,” Norris shouted back down. “You folks okay?”
Norris had directed his question at the couple in the black truck, who were climbing out of their vehicle now. A girl and a man at least twice her age. The man had pulled a 12-gauge double barrel shotgun out of the truck with him, though he smartly kept the barrels pointed at the ground.
“We’re okay,” the girl shouted back.
“Where’s the sheriff?” the man asked, peering up at them. “Stan around?”
“No idea,” Norris said. “We found the station empty last night.”
The young man walked over to the other two and they talked quietly amongst themselves.
“Locals,” Keo said quietly.
Norris nodded. “Looks like it.”
The private conversation done, the young man walked toward them and shouted up, “Can we come in? I don’t think it’s safe out here.” He glanced around him as if to drive the point home.
“What do you think?” Norris asked Keo, keeping his voice just low enough so it didn’t carry.
“The more the merrier,” Keo said.
Norris grunted. “That’s probably what they said at the Alamo, just before the Mexican army showed up.”
CHAPTER 7
The young man’s name was Jake, and the girl was his girlfriend, Tori. The older man was Henry, Tori’s father, and they had come straight from Henry’s farmhouse on the outskirts of town after climbing out of the storm cellar where they had survived last night. Their attempts to get in touch with someone on the phone or find out any information from the radio and TV had proven fruitless. It was an all-too-familiar story, and Keo wondered how many other people were saying the exact same thing to each other across the country this morning.
“It’s like the world just stopped,” Jake said.
“You guys stayed in the cellar all night?” Rachel asked.
Jake nodded. “Henry built it to withstand tornados. I guess it did its job against those things just fine, too.”
Norris told them about the creatures’ aversion to sunlight and about the covered windows around town.
“That explains it,” Henry said. “We knocked on a lot of houses on the way over here, but no one answered. The only house I tried going into was our neighbor’s. The door was unlocked, and when I went inside I swore I saw them moving around in the darkness. I ran out and never looked back.”
“What are they?” Tori asked. “Does anyone know?”
“Your friends and neighbors and a lot of strangers,” Keo said. He told them his story about Delia, and about his invasion theory. “You noticed there aren’t any bodies out there? But there’s blood everywhere. Why? Because all the dead aren’t dead anymore, and they’re hiding inside the dark buildings, waiting for nightfall. What happened last night will happen all over again tonight. We all know that, right?”
The others nodded, and no one said a word for a while.
With three extra bodies insi
de the lobby, the place felt less empty. Aaron remained at the window and hadn’t said a word. Keo had to look back at him every now and then just to make sure the kid hadn’t taken off yet. Rachel sat on the same desk with her daughter, who looked from face to face, depending on who was talking. She listened and ate her chips, and when she ran out, Rachel produced another one. Keo wondered how many bags the vending machine held and how long it would take Christine to go through all of them.
“What now?” Jake said finally, looking at Keo, then Norris.
“What do you mean?” Norris said.
“I mean, what do we do now? Stay here?” He looked over at Keo. “You said it yourself. It’ll start all over again tonight. So, what now? Do we just sit and wait for help that’s probably never going to come? If it’s this bad here in Bentley, how much worse is it in places like Shreveport, New Orleans, or Baton Rouge?”
“Rachel and I talked about going to Fort Damper,” Norris said.
Rachel nodded. “The Army’s there. It would be the safest place to be right now in the entire state, wouldn’t it?”
“Fort Polk’s bigger,” Henry said.
“But Damper’s closer,” Jake said.
Henry nodded. “That’s true. But even ‘closer’ doesn’t mean within walking distance.”
“That’s why man invented cars,” Norris said. “We can reach it within a day.”
“What about Shreveport instead?” Jake said. “Or one of the other big cities? There has to be some emergency organization in one of them. Maybe even the National Guard.” He looked hopeful as he said it, though maybe not necessarily optimistic.
“Cell towers are down,” Keo said. “There isn’t even anything on the radio. If the cities were still intact, or at least even semi-intact, they would be broadcasting as we speak.”
“Even FEMA’s gone down,” Norris said. “That’s not a good sign.”
“FEMA is the United States government,” Keo added. “If they’re down, then this thing is nationwide—not just isolated to Louisiana.”
“This just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?” Tori said. Her hands were trembling as they held a can of Coke in her lap.