A Collection of Creatures

by B R Grove

  Dread bursts in my gut like a hideous black boil. We’re going to die here.

  The door behind me slams open. “Hey!” A voice yells.

  I spin around in the chair and see the tall figure of a man in a lab coat. The shadows conceal his face, but I can make out the reflection of glasses. “What are you doing in here?”

  I try to speak but no sound comes out of me. He starts towards me and I shoot up and out of my seat. “I… um… I…”

  “You need to be back in your room,” he says, moving slowly like I’m a wild animal he’s trying not to scare. “It’s not safe for you to be wandering around like this.”

  In a split second, he lunges for me. I scream and duck under his arms, running back to the morgue. I fling the door open and run into the hall.

  Sirens blare over the PA system and lights in the hall start flashing red. The infected people behind the glass start to scream and howl. I turn right and race down the hall, praying that I’m going in the right direction.

  My heart thunders in my ears, making it impossible for me to hear if I’m being followed. I don’t dare to look behind me. I just keep running until I see a pair of double doors at the end of the hall, like a light at the end of a dark tunnel. I shove all my weight against them and they slam open. I’m sent sprawling into the chilling night air.

  The sky is pitch black and starless. It’s difficult to see where to go, but when I become aware of the thundering footsteps behind me, I pick a direction and sprint away. Tree branches slash my bare face and arms to ribbons, and I stumble three times after getting stabbed in the soles of my feet by rocks. Still, I keep going. I can’t stop.

  Up ahead I see the thin outline of a fence. Haven’s fence! I’m almost there! My heart leaps and I catapult myself toward it.

  An electric force slams into me like a freight train. I fly backward and land on the ground. My head hits the dirt hard and I find that I can’t move. I try to look up, and see three people in heavy armoured suits standing above me.

  Then everything blurs and goes dark.

  ~

  When I wake up again, I’m back in a hospital bed. I jolt upright, thinking that I’m back in the facility again. My hands are free this time, and I immediately go to pull out my IV.

  A familiar voice stops me. “Hold it!”

  I look up. It’s Doctor Manson, my family doctor from Haven! What’s he doing here? I take a moment to look at my surroundings, and I see that I’m not in the facility after all. Unlike that place, this room is warm and light with cream-coloured walls and a nice vase of orchids on a table across from my bed. I’m in Haven’s General Hospital, and I sigh in relief.

  I begin wonder if everything I’d experienced was just a vivid nightmare, when I rub the side of my neck. The prickles of a stitch poke into my palm, and I freeze. My bite is real. That means I was attacked in the woods! So why am I not infected yet? Have I been cured? If so… how?

  Doctor Manson takes my hand, startling me out of my thoughts. He moves it away from the IV, and pats it gently. “I’m glad you’re awake, Tanya,” he says. “You’ve been unconscious for a couple of days. We were getting worried.”

  A couple of days? How much time has passed? What day is it anyway? I have so many questions, but I decide to stick with some simple ones. “What happened?” I ask. “How did I get here?”

  He fluffs my pillow and pulls away. “To be perfectly honest,” he says. “I don’t have all of the answers. But from what I’ve been told by the police, your mother was worried when you didn’t come home from school. She called the authorities, who searched high and low for you throughout town. They eventually found you, unconscious and curled up in the fetal position at that old picnic area on Jameson and Wilde.”

  So…I did get over the fence in time? The last thing I remember before passing out was a blast of energy, like I’d been electrocuted. It makes no sense, since the fence hasn’t been electric in over a decade. We learned this in school. Did they electrocute it when Liam and I didn’t come back?

  “What about Liam?” I ask.

  He furrows his brow. “Liam?”

  “Liam Young! He was with me when we climbed over the fence.”

  He stiffens. “You did what?”

  He isn’t answering me, and I take that as a bad sign. “Where is he? Did they find him?” I knew he was dead, but maybe his body had been brought back to Haven. They weren’t just going to have him disappear, right?

  Doctor Manson shakes his head. “I didn’t even know he was with you. You were all alone when you were found.”

  Tears well up in my eyes. I won’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my best friend? Will he just be another Missing Persons case without an ending?

  “Tanya…” Doctor Manson takes my good hand and clasps it in his own. I look at him, and his eyes are sincere and stern. “…how much do you remember of your time in the woods?”

  I blink. “Um…”

  “Do you remember how you got that?” He continues, pointing at the stitch in my neck.

  “I…don’t remember,” I lie. How can I possibly begin to explain it all to him? It all seems so… absurd.

  He narrows his eyes, and for a second I think he doesn’t believe me. Then he releases my hand, stands up and goes to the door. He steps into the hall and nods at someone.

  My mother comes into the room, followed by a tall man in a suit. “Tanya?”

  “Mom…”

  She rushes over and hugs me close. “Thank god you’re okay,” she murmurs. I want to bury my face in her shoulder- to inhale the familiar smell of her soap and to forget everything that’s happened- but the stranger loitering in the doorway distracts me. Something is severely off about him.

  He’s so ordinary-looking that it’s difficult to describe, if that makes sense. Brown hair neatly gelled to his head, long horse-like face, neat and tailored blue suit. His eyes captivate me: piercing, unnaturally blue, and trained, unblinking, on me as if he’s analyzing me. It sends a shiver down my spine.

  Mom lets me go, and Doctor Manson gestures to the man. “Tanya, this is David Sherman.” He says this like I’m supposed to know who that is.

  I give him a blank stare, and he elaborates. “Mr. Sherman is our representative in the local government. Out of town.”

  I frown. Out of town? I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t from Haven, except for a couple new families who transferred. But we were all made aware that they were coming in the days before their arrival! No one ever showed up unannounced here.

  “We were worried about you, Miss Hadley,” David Sherman pipes up. “It is good that you are well.” He smiles. Or rather, he turns up the corners of his mouth in the mimicry of a smile. Something is weird about his pronunciation: he stretches his vowels and his voice lilts in weird places.

  Then he blinks, and my stomach drops like a stone. His eyelids close vertically, like an amphibian. It happens in a split second, and luckily my eyes were wide open.

  Mom and Doctor Manson must not have seen it, because they’re acting like everything’s fine. Or maybe they know… Either way, Doctor Manson proceeds to guide himself and my mother to the door. “Mr. Sherman will answer any questions you have about…what happened to you.”

  I open my mouth to protest, but they close the door. Just like that, I’m alone with…whatever ‘David Sherman’ really is.

  He slinks around the room, touching random objects like the flower vase on the table, or the picture frame on the wall. His movements are too rigid to be a normal person. Then he turns and stares at me with those too-blue, amphibian eyes of his. My skin crawls.

  “You are confused about the things you experienced in the forest.” It’s a statement, not a question.

  I nod, wondering where he’s going to go with this.

  “My colleagues at Blackwood gave me a detailed description of what happened after you escaped your room. You gave everyone quite a scare.”

  “Blackwood? What’s that?”

  He n
ever takes his eyes off of me. He stands at the foot of my bed, curling his long pale fingers around the metal bars. “The facility where you were taken. It’s where you received that.” He points to the stitch on my neck.

  The skin around the area starts to prickle and I press my hand over it.

  “You remember. That means your mind is sharp. That is curious, because the memory-numbing agents in Haven’s water supply have lost their effect on you.” He tilts his head to the side like an inquisitive cat. “Have you never wondered why the citizens of this town are content to stay within its borders? To not question what lies beyond?”

  I open my mouth, but I have no idea how to respond.

  “You have felt it, haven’t you?” His voice is low and soft, whispery. “The overwhelming feeling of something amiss in this place? That sense sent you and your friend over the fence, didn’t it? Into our clutches, didn’t it?”

  It makes so much sense, in such a twisted way. It means I’m not crazy or overthinking things, and that something was truly hanging over all of us, blinding us. Did Liam share this quirk with me? Is that what led to his death?

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

  He stands up straight. “I am telling you that your feelings are valid, and that you are far from being ‘crazy’ or ‘paranoid’. In fact, you might be immune to the substance, which may explain how you survived being infected.”

  A barrage of images floods my head: Liam’s clouded eyes; Theryn Freeman’s ambling corpse; the infected man behind the glass, and all the blood. I remember what I read in Theryn’s file back at the Blackwood facility. “What is it?” I ask. “The sickness- or virus, whatever it is- that killed Liam and Theryn Freeman and infected all those people?”

  His stare bores into my own. “Do you believe in other worlds?”

  It’s an odd question. “I don’t know.”

  “You should, because it explains the origins of this… virus, as you put it.” He says. “It’s an interdimensional parasite,” he explains. “It came into your world through a tear in reality, created by a group of your world’s scientists. It travels from one world to the next, infecting the residents with a savage sickness that degenerates the body and the mind until they become, essentially, walking corpses.”

  “So…a zombie parasite. From another world.”

  “More or less.”

  “And there’s no cure?”

  He turns his head back and forth, shaking it ‘no’. I wonder, with all of his inhuman behavior, if David Sherman is from one of these other worlds he’s spoken of.

  “Are there others like me? People who are immune?”

  “None that we are aware of, which is precisely what has everyone stumped. Theoretically, you shouldn’t have survived. The force field around your town’s fence detected you as one of the infected, which is why you were refused access at first…”

  That explains the force that knocked me out, I think to myself.

  “…but all we know is that you developed immunity sometime after that, the likes of which are one in the million or so humans that remain in this world.” He lifts the corner of his mouth. “I suppose this means that things will be changing soon.” His eyes blink vertically again, and I shiver. “Did that answer all of your questions?”

  “Not quite.”

  He stares at me, expectantly.

  “You’re not human, are you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “What are you? Why are you here?”

  He smiles genuinely, and it is the most horrific-looking thing I’ve ever seen. “Still so inquisitive,” he purrs. “Don’t worry yourself, Tanya. We are working with the humans to help you survive. You should focus on living the rest of your life in Haven. Remember: some things are better left in the dark.”

  With that, he walks to the door and leaves.

  I was released from the hospital a week later. Things haven’t been the same since the incident. People are more on edge. My mother constantly worries about me, which I guess is a good thing. But mostly I wish to be left alone.

  Liam’s family never got closure on their son’s disappearance. Nobody knows what happened to him, or what kinds of horrors lurk beyond the fence. No one except for me, and every day I wish that I didn’t. I wish that I’d died in that forest with Liam. At least we would’ve been together, even in death. Living with my best friend- the only person who really understood me- is hell.

  I went back to our picnic spot during one of my lunches at school. Our half-full Pepsi cans are still there, tucked up against the rocks like forgotten relics of a different time. I wonder if he was unfortunate enough to be resurrected as one of the living dead. Does he live behind the same glass walls as countless others now?

  I can’t bear to look into the woods beyond, afraid that I’ll see his reanimated corpse ambling towards me. Instead, I turn away and trudge back down the hill to civilization.

  I haven’t been back to the fence since. I think it’s better that way. Perhaps David Sherman is right: some things are better left in the dark.

  About the Author

  B.R. Grove is a self-taught writer and visual artist from Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.

  She loves music, folklore, dogs, the supernatural and sushi.

  This is her first book.

  ~

  Follow her online:

  @bgroveart

  brgrovewriting.weebly.com