by Ike Hamill
The clasp snapped under his bite and Brad pulled it back, practically snarling.
The noise finally drew the attention of one of the others at the far end of the room. Brad felt nothing but contempt and disgust for them. They had ignored his warnings for the last time.
He felt blood oozing down his chin and flowing from his wrist as he stood.
His arthritis and injuries couldn’t stop him.
“Brad?” Romie asked.
He ignored her. His eyes locked on the smallest child—that would be the easiest prey. When he stepped forward, his leg buckled and he adjusted, ignoring the pain. The people at the far end of the room were beginning to scramble. They finally understood.
Chapter 79: Corinna
In the morning light, Corinna covered the remaining distance to the Outpost at breakneck speed. Her gas gauge was nearly on empty, but she blew right by the fuel depot that someone had set up. The mountain roads were in tough shape. Orange symbols on the signs warned her to slow down. Corinna picked up even more speed when she crossed into the valley that led across to the Outpost.
Before she even reached the town, she knew what she would find.
They would all be gone. The citizens of the Outpost would have disappeared mysteriously. Instinct told her that she would find the same in Donnelly or even Gladstone.
This empty world was hers alone now.
A yellow rectangle of paper was secured to the front door of the town hall. Corinna left tire tracks across the lawn of the place and parked her motorcycle at the foot of the stairs.
The sign read, “Evacuated to Burke’s Cave.”
“Where the hell is that?” Corinna asked in a whisper. She put her hands on her hips and made a slow turn. The doors of the houses were all closed—that was a good sign. It didn’t look like anyone had stepped through their door and been called up into the sky.
The left door of the town hall was unlocked.
Corinna let herself in.
As the door swung shut behind her, she thought she heard a sound from upstairs, although it could have been an echo.
“Hello?” she called.
There was no response. A chill ran down her back.
“Nope,” she whispered to herself. “Fuck this.”
She pulled the door open again. The noise came again, along with a gust of wind. Corinna paused. The sound had only been a draft, wafting into the place. There was probably a window open upstairs with fluttering blinds.
When she let the door shut, the noise stopped.
“Hello?” she called, just to be sure. There was no answer. She walked around the counter, looking for a map or another note. She had no idea where Burke’s Cave was. They wouldn’t have left the cryptic note on the outside of the place and not provided more information.
“Unless they left in a hell of a hurry,” she whispered.
Corinna leaned against the counter and then looked down at her own hand. It still had dried blood under the fingernails. She glanced around, trying to remember which way the bathroom was.
There was a sign, hanging from the ceiling, that said, “Public Restrooms.”
She smirked and headed in that direction. On the way, she passed by a small conference room. Seven chairs had been pushed away from the table. In the center, she saw more than half of a sheet cake. The frosting read, “Happy Birthday, Glo…”
The rest of the name had been distributed with the lower corner. Cakes were a tremendous luxury. This one had been left to the flies.
Corinna confirmed her intuition from earlier. “A hell of a hurry,” she said to the empty conference room.
In the bathroom, the overhead lights came on automatically when she stepped inside. She went to the sink and turned on the water. It sputtered and coughed from the faucet, but then ran clear and warm.
The lights overhead flickered as she washed her hands.
Corinna held her breath for a moment, expecting that the suffocation might come next. After several seconds passed, she took a cautious breath. The air was still good.
She was wasting water. She rinsed her hands, checked them again, and then looked at herself in the mirror. There was still some blood around her nose and near her hairline. Until that moment, she had forgotten about the taste in her mouth from the flayed squirrel. Something had made her eat a raw animal in her dreams. Corinna barely ate meat at all. To imagine that she had torn one open with her teeth was unfathomable.
She turned on the water again and bend to splash it up on her face. She wanted to wash away all the disgusting blood.
When she heard the sound of feet on the stairs, Corinna straightened immediately. Her hands were still cupping her cheeks as she looked into the mirror with wide eyes.
She batted the water off and listened.
The feet reached the bottom stair.
Corinna pressed her back against the wall and scanned the room for something to use as a weapon. Water dripped from the faucet, down the stopper-less drain, and the sound seemed as loud as a klaxon, alerting the world to her presence. She circled to the wall behind the swing of the door and reached toward the handle.
She froze when she heard a bump from the direction of the office.
The rational, sane part of her brain told her that she was being silly. They had probably left someone behind to wait for stragglers. The Outpost was filled with old scientists and thinkers. They were nothing to worry about. When she heard the shuffling step down the hall, Corinna stomped down the rational part of her brain. This wasn’t a time for thinking—this was about survival. She hadn’t made it through the apocalypse or the decades after by ignore her instincts, and she wasn’t going to start now.
Corinna rolled her shoulders back and tensed herself, ready for whatever came through the door.
When the door opened an inch or so, Corinna readied herself to spring. She heard a strange sound coming through the crack. It sounded like a dog—specifically, like Liam’s old dog, Prince. He had sounded just like that when he detected that someone had food and he wanted a taste. Prince had been so tall that no counter had been high enough to keep food from his snuffling nose.
It wasn’t Prince on the other side of the door though.
Every instinct that Corinna possessed told her that whatever was on the other side of the door meant to do her harm. She almost wanted to spring forward and tear open the door so she could confront the threat directly.
Instead, she held still.
Surprise would be her advantage.
The door bumped as it closed. The sniffing nose was gone and Corinna heard the footsteps proceed down the hall. When she heard another faraway bump, from the back of the building, she reached forward and gently pulled the handle. She swung the door so slowly that the hinges didn’t make a sound. Corinna waited several seconds to see if anyone would come.
When nobody did, she moved around the door, angling her body to slip through. Looking up and down the hall, she eased the door shut behind herself, not letting it bump back to the jamb.
On her way by, she glanced at the cake. Apparently, it hadn’t interested whoever else was in the building. She continued down the hall, sliding her feet carefully so she could listen for the sound of other footsteps.
Pausing at the doorway to the office, Corinna waited, trying to hear the creeping person while her hand worked the latch on the fire extinguisher. It popped free and she carefully lifted it from its cradle and then pulled the tab. She tensed her hand on the lever and pointed the nozzle in front of herself as she sidestepped through the door. At the bottom of the stairs, she saw droplets of blood.
Corinna struggled to think if they had been there before. From her angle, they were picking up the light through the window. It was possible that she simply hadn’t seen them before. There were no footprints in the blood.
She glanced under the counter and then put it at her back, circling the room toward the front door. Through the heavy door and down the stairs, her motorcycle awaited, if she could on
ly reach it.
On the far side of the stairs, there was a long room. Corinna could see more and more of it as she inched toward the door. Her hand tensed on the fire extinguisher’s trigger, ready to shoot. When her shoulder was next to the front door, she took one hand away from the fire extinguisher, so she could reach for the handle. The extinguisher shook in her unsteady grip.
The door wouldn’t open.
It was as sturdy as a pillar of granite, blocking her exit. Corinna couldn’t understand. With the heel of her hand, she pounded on the door in frustration, only stopping when she realized how much noise she was making. She heard a shuffling sound from the back of the building. Whatever creature was in there with her, it had heard her.
Corinna put both hands on the fire extinguisher and readied herself by taking a deep breath. The heavy canister might even work better as a bludgeon. Corinna raised it to eye-level so she would be ready to fire or ram it, depending on her foe. She saw a shadow at the end of the hall, past the counters and the door to the room with the birthday cake.
For an instant, she saw something about to come around the corner and then the lights flickered and went out again. Whatever it was, the thing was lost in shadows. She could hear it shuffling and then she could hear it breathing. It took a long inhale and then let out the air in an excited wheeze.
It was a person. At least it had been at one time. She could tell by the outline that she saw against the ambient light in the hall. The thing shuffled and wheezed. Corinna thought about the people of the Outpost. Some of them were old. They had dedicated their last years to trying to figure out the world through the experiments of the Outpost. This person could be sick or injured. The fire extinguisher dropped a little in her grip when she remembered the blood on the floor.
“Stop,” she said. “Can’t you talk? If you can understand me, stop.”
It was no good—the shape didn’t answer her and kept moving. Directly across from her, the stairs offered high ground. If she could bolt for the stairs, then she would have a defendable position to watch the thing step into the light. She glanced up the stairs and a new thought occurred to her. There was no telling how many more might be upstairs.
Almost in response to her thought, she heard something clank up there.
When she looked back down, the thing in the hallway had covered most of the distance to her. It was sticking to the left side of the wall, staying in the shadow.
“This is your last chance,” she said. “Stop where you are.”
The thing kept moving.
Corinna wanted to see it. She wanted to know what she was up against, but when she heard another crash from upstairs, she snapped.
With a guttural scream, filled with rage, she pulled the handle on the fire extinguisher. It puffed a quick burst and then… nothing.
“Shit!” Corinna screamed. The thing emerged from the shadows, now dangerously close to her. With a reach and a lunge, it would be on her. The lights flickered on just as the thing was revealed by the sunlight, and Corinna was paralyzed by what she saw.
The monster bore a passing resemblance to Dianne—mostly because of its hair. Dianne had worn her long gray hair pulled back, highlighting the white streaks that flowed back from her temples. Corinna would have never recognized the face. The skin on its cheeks had been cut and ripped. A flap hung down from its forehead that partially blocked one eye. The split lips were pulled back to show smashed, jagged teeth. Blood seeped down the thing’s chin in a thick, dark stream.
One gnarled hand groped forward.
Corinna didn’t wait for the creature to reach her. She pushed the fire extinguisher out, aiming it right at the Dianne-monster’s face. The lip of the canister bounced off the thing’s forehead, but didn’t seem to slow it. The fire extinguisher tumbled to the floor. When the handle hit, it finally went off properly. A thick cloud of powdery white mist hissed from the canister to fill the lobby as Corinna scrambled away from the lurching monster.
She looked to the stairs and abandoned the thought immediately. A shadow was coming around the banister above, shuffling in the same undead way as the Dianne-monster. Instead, Corinna ran for the long room, hoping to find a fire exit or maybe an open window. In her haste, her shoulder hit the doorframe and she was spun around from the impact. She tumbled to the floor, sliding back, away from the entrance.
Through the glass in the front door of the building, she saw the yellow paper, taped to the outside. A horrible thought occurred to her—she had tried to exit through the wrong door. It was the door with the note that was open. The other one had been locked.
It was too late now.
Emerging from the expanding cloud of fire extinguisher gas, the Dianne-monster stepped directly between Corinna and the front door.
It was still reaching toward her with grasping hands as Corinna pushed herself away and got to her feet so she could run. She coughed at the smell of the hissing gas. There was no exit door, and no window that was open, even a crack. She kept running, past tables and dusty paintings hanging on the wall to the far end, where the door must have led back to the office area.
Corinna chanced a look back, hoping that the Dianne-monster was still shuffling just as slowly as it had before. What she saw made her heart stutter. There was nothing. The Dianne-monster had disappeared back into the fog. The fire extinguisher sputtered and then went silent.
Corinna remembered how the gas had instantly made her cough, but there was no sound of coughing from the haze. The Dianne-monster was unaffected, or maybe it just wasn’t breathing at all.
She couldn’t trust the door in front of her. The lights might be off, and the Dianne-monster might be looping around the other way to meet her in the dark. Corinna looked back to the windows. They weren’t open, but they would be. One way or the other, she was going to leave the building.
The sashes were huge and looked heavy as hell as Corinna stood on her toes to reach the latch. It fought her, but she managed to spin it out of the way. When Corinna put the heels of her hands against the wood and pushed, it creaked and groaned. The thing had been varnished shut, or maybe the wood had swollen in the tracks. It didn’t want to open.
“Okay. We’ll do it your way,” she whispered.
The tables were too big, but she found a wooden chair under one the paintings.
Corinna screamed her battle cry as she ran toward the window and smashed through the old glass with the chair. It chimed like bells as it shattered and fell. Corinna felt a fresh breeze of freedom come through the broken window as she rattled the chair in the opening to clear the broken glass.
Jagged triangles stood up from the frame. She scanned the room for a blanket or rug—anything to lay over the broken glass so she didn’t shred herself climbing through. It wasn’t far to the ground, but…
She turned at the sound.
Something had tumbled down the stairs and she heard what sounded like a dozen wordless whispers, all at once.
A hand emerged from the fog at the end of the room, pulling something across the floor.
Her mouth fell open as a second and third reaching hand appeared. She saw one of the bloody faces and realized that she had no hope of ever guessing the thing’s former identity. The mangled skin hung from its skull. One ear had flopped down and was brushing the thing’s shoulder.
That’s when the rear door of the long room began to creak. The Dianne-monster had made good time, creeping through the office area.
Corinna realized that she had no other choice. She wasn’t going to stick around to find out what these lurching monsters wanted from her. Some broken glass wasn’t going to stop her escape.
She ran for the window, extended her arms, and dove through.
If not for the bush outside the window, she might have made a clean getaway. Instead, the branches snagged her. They stole her momentum with long scratches down her arms and torso. Corinna pulled herself into a ball as she tumbled through. She hit the ground with her shoulder and rolled over ont
o her back.
Staggering to her feet, she ran toward the front of the building where her motorcycle was parked. The Dianne-monster had been smart enough to try to circle around and flank her. The others might be smart enough to cut her off from the motorcycle.
With that in mind, she went wide around the corner. Her heart soared when she saw the motorcycle sitting there, untouched by monsters.
They must have figured it out a moment too late. She looked up and saw their bloody faces behind the yellow sign, on the other side of the glass. The door began to swing inwards as Corinna jumped on her motorcycle and flipped up the kickstand. She was already rolling downhill when she hit the starter.
Nothing happened.
Her mind raced—wondering if she should ditch the bike and run. But she had practiced for this. On the road, the bike had conked out numerous times. The key was to roll through the bad stretch and then start it up.
She did just that. Corinna let the bike pick up speed, rolling down toward the road, as she stared at the gauges. As soon as the light came on, she stomped it into gear and popped the clutch, giving it plenty of gas as it tried to sputter to life.
When it caught, she spun the rear tire on the grass before she got ahold of herself. The motorcycle wobbled for a moment and then straightened out. Corinna was gaining speed as she bounced onto he pavement and really accelerated.
Her mind was racing as fast as the machine.
“Cave… Cave… Burke’s Cave!” she said to the wind.
