The Hoard

by Alan Ryker

  The pain subsided as she thought of the back corner of the shop. She lay curled up in the dry, sharp grass for a few moments then started again.

  First she pushed the riding mower in front of the door. Then she smashed the garage door tracks with a sledgehammer. Finally, she burrowed into the garbage in the back corner. Warmth pulsed from the base of her skull and slowly flowed over her brain, taking all worry and pain and thought with it.

  Hugging her gut, Anna slept.

  CHAPTER 20

  Rebecca slipped out of bed, found her previous day’s clothes and got dressed without waking her fiancé. That wasn’t so much a commentary on her ninja-like silence as on his coma-like slumber.

  She rubbed his shoulder. “I have to go.”

  He muttered some nonsense, and she kissed him on the cheek. She’d leave him a note on the marker board in the kitchen. He was used to it.

  Her heart still pounded a bit harder than usual from the adrenaline of being woken with an emergency call at 5 AM. She wished she’d been able to get more out of Anna about what the trouble was, but she’d hung up quickly.

  Not knowing what type of emergency it was, Rebecca called 911 for an ambulance, and then personally called the Sheriff’s Department, explaining the situation and letting them know that she’d be heading that way, too. They’d get there before her, but probably not by too much.

  She grabbed a granola bar on her way out the door.

  * * *

  The lights of the ambulance and the sheriff’s car spun silently in the twilight. It was eerie. Very eerie. At first, Rebecca couldn’t say why. Then she realized it was the total silence and stillness. Even without the sirens on, she expected some sort of commotion when she came upon spinning emergency lights.

  Not only wasn’t there the commotion of an emergency, there wasn’t even the grumbling, perfunctory routine that followed a false alarm.

  Rebecca pulled off into the boulder-sized gravel that got graded to the side of the road and stepped out of her car. The moist morning air was sweet. Normally, the silence would have seemed peaceful. At that moment, though, it was heavy, ominous—pregnant.

  She walked to the ambulance. The back doors stood open.

  But the front door of the house was shut. They wouldn’t close themselves into that disaster area.

  The radio in the cruiser squawked. Rebecca couldn’t make out everything through the closed car, the codes and the static, but she got that someone wanted a status report.

  She scanned the scene. The air was cool, the moisture in the air pleasant instead of suffocating. The sun should have been peeking over the hedges of the field to the east, but the sky was cloudy. Birds chirped, and mockingbirds mocked them.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Rebecca called the Sheriff’s Department. Stan had taken over since she’d last called.

  “Stan? Rebecca Shoemaker.”

  “Hey, Rebecca, what can I help you with? Oh, wait, Anna Grish, right?”

  “Yeah, what’s going on? I’m here, and the vehicles are out here, but I don’t see anyone.” Though the windows on either side of the front door were covered, the house watched her.

  “Shit. Deputy Donaldson reported that he’d arrived, but we haven’t been able to get an update from him. What’s the situation?”

  “An ambulance is here, spinners going and doors open. There’s a cruiser, too. But the front door of the house is shut, and I’ve been standing here for a couple of minutes and nothing’s moved or made a sound.”

  “Rebecca, get back in your car. I’ll send—”

  “Donaldson!” She started up the gravel drive. When she was within twenty yards, something shifted the window coverings. She squinted and leaned forward, but could make out nothing.

  “Rebecca, get back in your car,” Stan said.

  “There’s someone in the house. They’re looking at me through the window.”

  “Who? Rebecca, get back to your damn car.”

  Rebecca didn’t need to be convinced. She backed away.

  Then the door opened, and out spilled a sprinting pack of grimy, nearly naked people. Kids, adults, the elderly, all running at her full-tilt.

  “There are people. Lots of people,” she said in a moment of stunned paralysis.

  Too late, Rebecca turned and ran. They plowed into her, driving her to the ground. She screamed as she fell, then the air left her lungs as hundreds of pounds pressed down on top of her. For a moment she thought only of her ribcage and skull, which seemed certain to collapse and burst. Then everything went numb for a few moments.

  Then, she didn’t think anything.

  * * *

  Rebecca awoke in a fetid womb. Her sinuses burned with the warm, wet smell of mold, garbage and offal, both cat and human. She gagged, then held her breath. She struggled to slowly turn her head back and forth, searching for a safe place to breathe and finding only more filth. Above her, below her, to either side; she was buried in it. Finally, lungs burning, she sucked in a huge lungful of the awful air, dragging it through the moist, suffocating garbage.

  Of course, then she vomited, and struggled to spit out chunks of granola bar without taking in mouthfuls of the filth.

  Below her, something squirmed. Something large. They were separated by a foot or two of trash, but something human-sized was buried below her.

  Above, one of those people, those filthy, wretched freaks, stomped over her.

  They’d buried her in trash. It made no sense.

  But they hadn’t buried her deep. She struggled to dig herself out, but found her wrists bound behind her back. She kicked her feet, and found they only moved in unison, as something secured her ankles together.

  The insanity of the situation crushed in on her. She thought back to the mob that had swarmed over her. They had looked like the survivors of some sort of horrible, near-apocalyptic tragedy. Their faces held the blank expressions of those who had seen such horror that they were beyond fear, beyond hope, beyond sorrow.

  But something drove them. Something propelled them out of that house at her. To bury her there, to live in that filth so that it covered their entire bodies… What had driven them to abandon their humanity?

  Rebecca couldn’t understand. Nothing made sense.

  Then she heard a muffled sound from the outside world, from the sane world.

  A voice through a megaphone…

  She listened closely. It was the Sheriff’s Department. They were talking to the freaks as if they were normal people. They didn’t know, yet. But it sounded like they were nearly done talking.

  Rebecca began to dig with her heels, clearing space and then pressing down as much as she could. She felt her body begin to slide up, through the heap. Whoever they’d buried beneath her suffered for it and squirmed in protest, but she had to push through.

  Her thighs and abs burned as she twisted back and forth, giving herself room to work, slowly pressing herself up. Once she’d cleared some space around herself, she could awkwardly push down with the heels of her hands, though they were bound behind her.

  She rammed her way headfirst through trash, but also books and boxes. Her face and upper chest burned, and she understood that she’d been scraped up on the gravel when they ground her into the driveway. The idea of all that putrefying waste soaking into open wounds on her face made her frantic. She strained and kicked, some of it helping to press her out of the heap, but some of it only hurting her as she thrashed around heedlessly.

  Finally, the top of her head emerged from the heap. She couldn’t believe how good it felt to breathe that horrible air. Somehow the air had gotten so much worse since her last time inside the house, something she wouldn’t have believed possible. And yet she breathed in huge gasps of it.

  But she couldn’t see. She’d come up beneath something made of cloth. Alternately gripping it in her teeth and letting it go, she turned her head back and forth until she could see the room.

  No lights were on, and the windows were all
covered, but after the pitch black of the heap, Rebecca could see clearly. And hear clearly, too.

  “This is your last chance! Come out now!”

  None of them moved.

  The freaks squatted atop the piles of trash. They jerked at the sound of the megaphone, but they didn’t speak, didn’t move.

  Rebecca scanned the room, and saw more of the sub-humans crouched and folded into tunnels throughout the trash. If they were scared, they didn’t show it.

  Beside the door, the hoard had been piled ridiculously high, far higher than Anna had ever had it.

  Where was Anna? Rebecca scanned the room again and couldn’t find her. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see her among the squatters. Though Anna’s behavior didn’t make any more sense now than it had earlier, she seemed to have a lot of company in her madness.

  Debris toppled down the tower of garbage beside the front door, drawing Rebecca’s thoughts back out to the horrors around her. From over the lip of the heap, a face stared at her. Someone was pressed between the top of the pile and the ceiling.

  The man pointed at her. “Bury her.”

  Several of the wretches started towards Rebecca. With odd, insectile grace, they skittered on all fours across the unstable surface.

  Rebecca screamed and begged. She thrashed, kicking at the trash beneath her. If they buried her again, she knew she’d go mad.

  Glass shattered, and a canister bounced over the trash. It settled in a valley and spun lazily, belching out white smoke.

  They all stopped and watched it.

  Rebecca, understanding it was tear gas, squinted in anticipation of what was sure to follow.

  More canisters crashed through the windows, battering through blinds and knocking aside the blankets secured over them.

  The gas settled over Rebecca, first attacking her eyes, then her sinuses and lungs. She forced her eyes to open a sliver, and saw the wretches watching the canisters calmly. They seemed completely unaffected by the gas, except that it distracted them enough that they had forgotten about her.

  Rachel clamped her eyes shut, squeezing out the tears that had pooled between her barely opened lids.

  Nothing moved. The only sound was the hissing of the gas, which came out as a lower and lower note as the canisters spent themselves.

  In the total silence, the sudden pounding of boots on the old, weathered wood of the porch boomed.

  She thanked God. They were coming to rescue her.

  The door exploded open. Though her burning eyes seemed almost swollen shut, Rebecca forced them open and saw the blur of law men striding in through the blinding light of the cloudy sky.

  It was daytime outside. The light split into a spectrum of color through the prisms of Rebecca’s tears. She’d almost forgotten that the whole world wasn’t a dank, dark pit. Unable to force her eyes open any longer, she let them squeeze shut. Tears poured down her cheeks. Snot ran from her nose.

  “Get down on your faces!”

  She heard the men move farther into the house. Tentative squishing and sliding replaced the confident reverberations of stomping boots.

  “I said get down on your fucking faces!”

  Rebecca forced her eyes open again. The wretches didn’t move an inch. Then one of the tall figures of the lawmen disappeared into the center of a heap.

  Gunfire exploded in the small house.

  And then, even through eyes squinted shut in pain, Rebecca saw the world once again go dark. The floor shook, and no more light poured through the open door.

  All around her, things leapt and crashed.

  As best she could, Rebecca squirmed back into the garbage pile from which she’d just emerged.

  CHAPTER 21

  Bryce hadn’t considered that Rebecca would call the police. Once, he would have been able to predict that. He’d had one of the most brilliant minds in the biology department at Kansas State. Though he hadn’t attained his PhD yet, he’d often had better insights in the lab than that of his tenured professors. Now, he saw the present moment, and not far beyond. Laying any sort of trap took more forethought than any of those around him had. With his nestmates as an extremely favorable contrast, he hadn’t realized how diminished his logic faculties had become.

  At that moment, he sat on his perch. The things in his veins wanted him to get low, but in this instance, he defied them. In order to cow the others, he must be above them. They must crane their necks to gaze up at him.

  The police had sent cans of smoke crashing through. He knew it should have hurt his eyes. It didn’t.

  The police yelled through their loud speakers. They said a lot of things. Mostly they demanded that Bryce and the others come out and give up. That wouldn’t happen.

  From above, Bryce watched them pour through the doorway. They entered with arrogance, but soon found themselves either stumbling clumsily over the heap or funneled into slaughtering pens.

  As Bryce’s eyes adjusted to the horrible light, he saw that they wore gas masks.

  One of them stumbled too close to a tunnel and was pulled in. As the masked man screamed and struggled and slid into the heap, the other officers shot at the pile, achieving nothing.

  But soon they would realize that no peaceful resolution was possible and they would turn those guns on the horde. Adrenaline poured into Bryce’s veins. He slid from his throne, to the side opposite the door, and with strength even he didn’t know he had, he shoved the massive pile of garbage over.

  It toppled before the door in slow motion, entirely crushing one deputy who was too slow to get out of the way, and pinning the legs of another who tried to leap away, but slipped.

  Bryce jumped over the pile, landing on the man’s head and stomping it into the garbage over and over until it burst against the hard inner-surface of his mask, and his brains enriched the nest.

  The others put their backs together, but they couldn’t see without the horrible light that had poured through the doorway. One looked straight at Bryce, but didn’t fire.

  Bryce snatched his shotgun with one hand, his mask with the other. It took a few yanks to get the mask off. The man fell to the ground and started shouting, then coughing and vomiting.

  “Kill them!” Bryce roared. These men would not become hosts. Bryce wouldn’t give them that gift. They had attacked the nest, and they would die.

  The nestmates swarmed as the deputies flicked on flashlights brighter than the sun. The blind fought the blind. Bryce saw a young boy’s chest cave in behind a blast of buckshot. But the deputies couldn’t shoot indiscriminately. They couldn’t sense each other the way the hosts could. They didn’t know the nest the way the hosts did.

  “Take their masks!” Bryce shouted.

  Then flashlight beams that had been spinning around the room, illuminating mostly dust, found his face. With a quick bound, Bryce closed the distance between himself and the two deputies, shoving them backwards into the others. Smashing at their faces with one hand, he effortlessly batted aside their weapons with the other.

  The hosts began to close around the officers, from over and under the heaps.

  Then the pile that had been his throne, that Bryce had shoved in front of the doorway, began to topple again, this time into the back of his legs. He turned in time to be blinded by a wide strip of sky at the top of the doorway, and the tactical lights of two deputies from outside working their way inside.

  For a moment, Bryce froze, waiting blindly with clenched eyes for a blast of buckshot to the chest that never came. Then he understood that they couldn’t shoot him where he stood, practically in the midst of their friends.

  Bryce hurled himself over the deputies, past the rest of the colony, and scampered over the heap towards the hallway.

  He risked a glance back as they opened fire, and saw his nestmates being torn apart. As they were blown open, the tiny gods squirmed out of them and released pheromone screams thickly into the air. Bryce froze.

  A small host, an old man with his left arm dangling b
y only his bicep muscle, was galvanized into such a fury, that he leapt among the men. He ripped the mask from one before hurling him into another, knocking them both onto the ground, where one disappeared screaming beneath the heap as pale arms wrapped around him and dragged him in.

  Bryce was torn. The pheromones in the air demanded that he defend the nest, while the jolts in his brain demanded that he escape and begin a new nest, or they would all perish.

  Other forces battled in Bryce’s brain as well, his own contradictory motivations. His sense of self-preservation was strong, but he had taken quickly to the position of ruler. He’d always been a nerd. He had never before in his life had such power, and he didn’t want to relinquish any of it. His pride wanted him to destroy the intruders, to make them suffer, to grind their faces in defeat. He wanted to bury them, not inside the nest, not to give them the gift of becoming a host, but outside, in the dusty earth. It was the worst fate he could think of. He wanted them to suffer.

  A teenage girl, wearing only panties, stumbled dazedly towards the officers. One reached out and shepherded her behind them as he aimed over her shoulder. Once behind him, she grabbed his throat in both hands and tore it out.

  A woman reached from a tunnel and grabbed the legs of a giant, trying to topple him. His bulk didn’t budge. Bryce saw her face illuminated by the tactical light just before it disappeared in a red burst. The giant kicked away her skittering hands.

  Reluctantly, Bryce turned from the battle and to the hallway. A blast smashed into the wall beside him just as he rounded the corner, and punched him in the lower back.

  In the bathroom, he stomped through the soggy floorboard beside the toilet. Reaching into the floor, he tore the hole wider then slid beneath the house.

  Safely below, he felt at his lower back and found three holes. He reached into them and felt the shot pellets. They hadn’t gone deep, had probably gone through two layers of drywall before hitting him.