The Gristle & Bone Series (Book 1): The Flayed & The Dying

by Roach, Aaron

  “What the hell are those things?!” Hank shouted, stumbling backwards. He removed his pistol from its holster and began firing blindly into the horde. The bullets did very little damage; one caught a creature straight through its eye cavity, exploding the back of its skull outwards, but the rest merely ricocheted or were enveloped into the mass of bodies with low thuds.

  “Hurry up, hurry up!” Thaniel stabbed frantically at the elevator call button with his finger, watching as the highlighted numbers above slowly counted down towards him. When it hit one, the doors dinged open and Thaniel flung himself into the small space. “Hank, come on!”

  Hank turned at his name. At the same time, the dam of monsters trying to claw their way through the narrow entrance burst through. They spilled across the lobby floor at a run and were on Hank in less than a second. They stabbed at him with gnashing teeth and jagged bones. A larger skeleton pulled him into a bear hug, crushing him against the sharp points of its broken, protruding ribs. For a brief moment before he died, Hank looked like a freakish conjoined twin attached at the monster’s torso. It was the last thing Thaniel saw of the man as the doors slid closed and the elevator began its slow ascent.

  The ride up to the eighth floor where Thaniel worked was the longest in his life. Howling and screaming would get louder as the elevator neared one floor, only for it to fade away to silence as it passed through the next. Whatever those things were, they were already occupying some of the floors of the building. Thaniel’s blood turned cold with the realization that there was no way to tell if the eighth floor was one of those already inhabited by the dead. He moved to press the emergency stop but paused with his finger an inch from the button. If he pressed it, the elevator would stop, and the alarm inside would go off. The only thing more terrifying than the idea of stepping out of the elevator into a roomful of monsters was being stuck in an immobile box in a building full of them while alarms went off above his head. He dropped his hand and watched with dread as the light above the door illuminated the number eight. With a ding, the doors slid open.

  “Thaniel!”

  A group of his colleagues had encircled the elevator doors armed with broomsticks, staplers, and even a chair leg. He looked at their faces and saw the relief there. No doubt they had been expecting to use their makeshift weapons on whatever emerged from the elevator.

  “Man, are we happy it’s you,” said Jason, lowering the mop handle he’d been holding like a baseball bat. One by one, his colleagues did the same.

  “What’s going on out there, Thaniel?” asked Kim.

  “I…I don’t know, Kim,” he stammered by way of response.

  Chris Matteson, the paper’s chief editor and their boss, spoke next, “You’re supposed to be a journalist, Briends and whatever is going on out there is news. Find your words and tell us what’s going on,” he demanded.

  “I don’t know, Chris. Everyone just…something bad has happened, an attack or something. Everyone out there is mutilating themselves and killing each other.”

  “Nonsense,” said Chris in disbelief. “Those are clearly rioters, maybe even Frontier sympathizers. Damn! Maybe the rebellion is launching an offensive! Now that would be news!”

  Thaniel stared at the man. Rioters? A rebellion offensive? Then it clicked. His colleagues had been safe up on the eighth floor, with only a bird’s-eye view of the chaos down below. That’s all they’d had to go on- that, and the mysterious screaming coming from other parts of the building.

  “…could be a Ranger terrorist attack.” Chris continued.

  “Chris, all of you, listen to me,” Thaniel interrupted. He took a moment to try to find his words. “I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but all that screaming you hear? Those are not people, they’re...” he hesitated; his vocabulary didn’t have a word for what those things were. He shook his head, and continued, “Just trust me. One minute, everyone was fine, the next, everyone was on the ground tearing at their own bodies until they died. And the moment after that? Hell, after that, they came back to life and started chasing and killing everyone else. I saw it with my own eyes. They killed Hank, and they almost got me.”

  They stared at him, dumbstruck, before Chris spoke again, rebuffing him, “You’re clearly suffering from some form of hysteria, Briends. You don’t know what you saw.”

  Inside, Thaniel cursed the man.

  “Well, we’re glad to see you alive, anyways,” said Jason, cutting in and putting a calming hand on Thaniel’s shoulder. Thaniel nodded his thanks.

  Above, on the ninth floor, howling and the sound of crashing furniture froze them all.

  “What the hell is that?” muttered Brienna, her eyes staring up through the ceiling.

  “I’m telling you guys, that’s what those noises are. Those mutilated people. No, not people, whatever they are…” he paused, remembering how Hank had died. He shook the image out of his head and continued, “…they have somehow made weapons out of their own body parts. I can’t describe it. They don’t just bite, they…stab.”

  Eventually, Kim spoke. “So, what do we do?”

  Chris scoffed and turned his back on them, crossing his arms and shaking his head in angry disbelief.

  Thaniel ignored him and thought for a moment, remembering the way the monsters moved, how fast and incredibly vicious they were. “Whatever we do, we can’t let them get in here. Eric, help me, will you?”

  The floor space was set up like a newsroom straight out of the sixties, with the writers’ desks laid out in neat rows. Thaniel always hated the setup but his higher-ups, Chris namely, had argued that it was good for productivity. Thaniel and Eric took both ends of the nearest desk, lifted it, brought it into the elevator, and with great effort, noiselessly leaned it upright against the back wall. The rest of his colleagues gathered more chairs and desks and followed suit, piling the materials into the space until it was completely full. Satisfied there would be no surprise visits via the elevator, he pressed the button and dispatched it back to the first floor.

  “Now what?” asked Jason.

  “We barricade the stairs,” replied Thaniel, already moving to drag another desk across the access to the emergency stairwell.

  “Then how exactly are we supposed to get out of here, Briends?” demanded Chris. The man had watched them drag furniture across the room without helping. “Or do you mean to imprison us in here?”

  Damn.

  Thaniel hadn’t thought of that, or about what would happen next. Do they wait for the army? The police? Try to leave? What about food and water?

  Thaniel had no answers and his face must have betrayed his doubt.

  “Exactly, that’s what I thought,” said Chris. He walked towards the group, patting his hands reassuringly at the air. “Listen up,” he said, “I understand we are all afraid, and that Briends’s story has got us all on edge.” He shot a disapproving glance Thaniel’s way. “But we are all adults and there are no such things as monsters. Come on, we all know that.”

  The others looked around at each other, some nodding their heads in agreement.

  Chris continued, “So here’s my plan. We take these stairs, head downstairs, and we go back home to our families for the day. Make sure they’re safe.”

  “Chris, I really don’t think that’s a good idea,” Thaniel tried to interrupt.

  “You’ve said enough, Briends,” hissed Chris, before turning a smile back at the others. “So, who’s with me?”

  The others in the group looked at Thaniel, then back to Chris, deciding. Thaniel merely shrugged, not saying anything, but Chris held their gaze with that conceited smile of his. Slowly, Kim and Brienna raised their hands, followed by the others. Eric and Jason gave Thaniel an apologetic look when they raised theirs. Chris threw Thaniel a condescending smirk of victory before walking to the stairway to hold the door open. “After you.”

  “Guys, please, this won’t end well,” Thaniel warned as his colleagues walked past him. He couldn’t blame them, though. He didn
’t have a family to go back to, but they did, and Chris was offering an opportunity to see them again. As they disappeared into the stairwell, he closed the door behind them and dragged a single desk across it.

  The sound of an explosion far away brought his attention to the floor-to-ceiling windows that encircled the entire office. He walked over, put his hand up on the glass, and took in the chaos of the city. Across the landscape, pillars of smoke reached up like grasping fingers and below, the streets were filled with hundreds of running figures. Oddly, interspersed among the runners, were several dozen others who walked more slowly, almost nonchalantly, through the madness. Another explosion, this time from a car just below, sent up another grasping tendril of black smoke. Over by the golden dome of the statehouse, he could see fires beginning to rage, and the sounds of gunfire, almost muted from this high up, came to his ears. If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought that Boston was in the middle of a warzone, as if someone had rained bombs across the city.

  Worse than a thousand nuclear bombs, a voice whispered at the back of his mind.

  Realization hit hard.

  “There’s no way!” he denied loudly to the empty room. Thaniel ran over to his desk and began pulling out drawers, searching.

  Where is it, where is it, where is it? Aha, yes!

  Thaniel yanked out his trusty tape recorder from the desk drawer. The thing was heavy and bulky, a throwback to the technology of the mid- ‘70s. It had been a gift from his parents for his thirteenth birthday, given to him while on a camping trip to Montana. He’d kept it all this time; from the school newspaper in high school, through college, until his current tenure at the New England Times; he’d used it to record conversations with his sources. Better technology now existed, but he liked the retro feel of the thing. Besides, it was almost a good luck charm at this point.

  Thaniel pressed the rewind button and heard the whirring of the tape inside being wound backwards until it clicked ready. Before he could press the play button though, a cry for help erupted from the stairwell. The cry was followed by the baying of the dead and frantic pounding from the other side of the stairwell door where voices begged to be let inside. Thaniel dropped the recorder and ran over to the desk that barred the entry and shoved it aside.

  Eric, Jason, and Kim tumbled into the room, falling over themselves. A second later, Chris came running in, shouting for them to shut the door.

  “Where’s Brienna?” demanded Thaniel.

  “She’s gone, just shut the fucking door!” shrieked Chris.

  At that moment, two skeleton creatures came roaring down the stairs, while another ran up the walls of the stairwell from the floor below, closing in.

  Thaniel tried to slam the door shut before they could gain entry, but the creatures crashed against it, almost throwing him off. Before they could spill into the room, though, Eric, Jason and Kim were there throwing their weight in with Thaniel’s. Collectively, they somehow managed to get the door shut far enough for the latch to click closed.

  “Get the desks, get all the desks!” Thaniel shouted, afraid to let go of the violently shaking door. Jason and Kim broke off and dragged the nearest desk over, then grabbed another, and another. They piled them high against the door, until the surface of the uppermost desk almost reached the top of the doorframe. Still, the door rattled and shook.

  The four of them backed slowly away from the improvised blockade, praying it would hold. The shrieking on the other side intensified, indicating that many more creatures had joined the attack. But, mercifully, nothing came through. Eventually, after a long while, the stairwell grew quiet.

  “Are they gone?” whispered Eric, shakingly. He hadn’t taken his eyes from the door.

  “Maybe,” said Thaniel in a whisper. “Best to speak quietly though, just in case.”

  The others nodded.

  “What the hell happened out there?” Thaniel asked.

  The three looked at each other, unsure of who should tell the story, before Kim finally spoke.

  “We made it down to the sixth floor when we ran into one of those…those things. It was just like you said, but worse somehow. Your description hadn’t done it justice, Thaniel. Oh God, the noise it made when it came after us…I’ve never heard anything like it,” she finished with a shudder.

  “We turned around and started running back up here,” said Eric, picking up the story. “But it moved so fast, man. It was on Chris and Brienna in seconds.” His eyes went dark with anger.

  “What happened?”

  “Chris… he fell. That fucker fell, and when Brienna went to help him, he yanked her down onto the monster while he scrambled away. She didn’t stand a chance.”

  Thaniel digested the story, outraged, before turning and marching into Chris’ office. The man, cowering beneath his desk, shouted at him to get out. Thaniel ignored him and reached down to yank him out by his collar.

  “You were too proud to listen to me and now you’ve gotten Brienna killed, you stupid bastard!” Thaniel snapped as loud as he dared.

  “I’m…I didn’t…”

  But Thaniel wasn’t having any of it. He cocked his fist back and punched the man hard across the jaw, knocking him out cold.

  -15-

  Kat had been making good time, heading towards the Longfellow Bridge that would take her across the river to her apartment building in Cambridge, when she had come across the girl and the monster in the tree. At first, she was going to continue her journey home and leave the girl to her fate; but a second glance up at the tiny trembling form with the monster only a few feet away had filled her with guilt.

  Kat couldn’t just walk away. Not without trying something, anything, to help. She picked up a rock and threw it at the creature, watching it soar skyward towards intended mark only for it to fall short and come plummeting back to earth. For a moment, her heart sank with the stone, but the noise it made in its descent was enough to distract the skeleton from clawing open the little girl.

  Kat watched as the monster scrambled halfway back down the tree before leaping off and landing only a few feet away from her, right where the rock had fallen. As it hit the ground, it punched its jagged fists into the earth, throwing up clumps of grass.

  Kat was a statue as the creature searched frantically for the source of the noise. Behind the monster, she watched the little girl descend like a little monkey, nimbly and silently moving from branch to branch down the tree.

  Atta girl.

  As the girl neared the bottom, Kat began waving her hands up and down to get her attention, to signal her to get help or something; but the child was so intent on searching where to put her hands and feet that she didn’t see her. Kat waved her arms higher and faster, willing the girl to look her way.

  Hey, she wanted to scream, Over here! It’s your turn to help me now!

  But she couldn’t risk voicing it, not with the skeleton thing so close.

  Kat threw a quick glance to check on the creature and stopped dead, her heart rising in her throat. The thing was no longer pawing at the ground. Instead, it had come up on both legs and was now facing her, its cranium tilted in hungry curiosity. The dark sockets of its once-eyes seemed to peer through her, and its mouth salivated. The thing had almost no flesh left on its face, but what little remained of its expression seemed angry, as if it understood it had been tricked.

  Oh shit.

  Behind the skeleton-thing, the child reached the tree’s bottom and stepped soundlessly back to earth. Once safe on the ground, she turned to Kat and nodded in thanks or acknowledgment. Then she backed away behind some bushes and disappeared from sight.

  Kat was left alone with the creature. Great. She cursed herself for having stopped to help.

  The skeleton-thing turned its face towards the sky and opened its maw, letting the full length of its tongue roll out, panting. Kat watched it shudder and grip the handles of its ribs in ecstasy. It now made a new sound – not a howl, or a roar, or a scream – but a loud grunting,
spitting noise that penetrated the air. It sounded like a hunter’s call to lure in deer, but she didn’t know enough about hunting to be sure. Nearby and all around, dozens of moans, low and long, came back in reply, as if a cold wind had been summoned. The moans were followed by the sounds of crashing, unseen bodies stumbling through the trees in their direction.

  The creature’s head suddenly snapped sideways in an explosion of glass, tearing Kat’s attention away from the incoming noise. A second later, she caught a glimpse of an empty beer bottle hurtling through the air. It landed, splintering into a thousand pieces against a nearby park bench. The creature tore after it, leaving her standing there alone and confused.

  “Psst! Hey!” came a low whisper from her left.

  The girl had come back for her. In her arms were glass bottles she must have dug out of a nearby trashcan, and which now she tossed around the creature like hand grenades. While the creature scavenged blindly at the noise like a cat chasing twine, Kat made her escape. She ran towards and then past the little girl, murmuring for her to follow as she did.

  A quick look backwards revealed that the creature wasn’t following. However, her blood turned cold at the sight of dozens of people, their bodies bearing bite marks and stab wounds, shuffling slowly out of a nearby treeline, heading in the direction of the monster. Their groans, low and hungry, seemed to follow the girls’ departure.

  -16-

  From his little corner in the custodial closet, Don fondled the cold mound of Delilah’s bare breast. He had been doing this for some time, touching himself and imagining all sorts of sordid scenarios when he finally noticed the moaning of the dead outside had ceased. He crawled across Delilah’s still form and cracked the door open, peering out into the museum hall.

  They’re gone.

  In the open space of the museum floor, the only evidence of the gruesome scene that had occurred there earlier were the crimson puddles on the floor and the blood spatter on the walls. There were no bodies, no sleepwalkers, and no blood eagles.