by Roach, Aaron
“Yes, but they don’t see the…the things.”
Kat swore. Sophia was right. Atop the buildings and through windows, just out of sight of those down below, they could see the dark silhouettes of the dead – skeletons and sleepwalkers alike –watching and waiting.
Waiting for this.
“Hey!” Kat shouted, smacking her hand against the windowpane in trying to make herself heard to the officers outside. “Hey! It’s a trap!”
A chorus of loud moans from the hall rose with her shouts, drowning her out and terrifying her into silence. Unable to continue shouting warnings, she and Sophia could only watch helplessly and await in silence the massacre they knew was about to unfold below.
The officer waiting at the rear of the van shouted to the officer advancing on the SUV, who quickened his pace in reply. When he drew close to the vehicle, he used hand gestures to beckon the family out. There were five of them, the husband and wife and their three children.
The parents huddled their children close and the officer began escorting them to the van, his rifle held at the ready. Halfway back, the night was interrupted by cacophony of shrieking and grunting, like gorillas speaking to one another with bird calls.
At the sudden noise, the mother cried out in despair and pulled her children in close. The officer at the rear of the van began gesturing with his arms, beckoning his partner and the family to run.
From Kat and Sophia’s window, a downward blur filled their vision for a half-second, as a body fell from somewhere above. It landed on the ground hard below them. Then another, and another, until raining bodies filled the air. They hit the ground with thuds. Those whose legs survived the fall came back erect on their feet, and those whose legs didn’t pulled themselves at a crawl. But all made their way towards the living.
The cop assisting the family let out a burst of gunfire at the incoming corpses while the second officer moved to slam the van doors shut. Before the doors could close all the way, however, he was stopped as a skeleton-thing dropped from the sky and landed on the van’s roof. It roared into the officer’s face before pulling him screaming into its jagged embrace.
The door was left ajar.
At the sight of his comrade dying, the first officer broke away from the family, firing his gun madly into the skeleton which jolted and squealed at the assault and tried to leap away. The officer was well trained, however, and his weapon traced its path as it scrambled from the van, peppering it with bullets. A few more rounds of gunfire saw the thing fall to the ground, motionless.
From their window, Kat and Sophia watched in fear. Not from the officer’s death by the skeleton-thing or the brutal way his partner avenged him, but from what happened in-between. While the officer fired his weapon, the sleepwalkers stilled themselves to watch. They stood like statues and stared with gray lifeless eyes at the battle between living man and bones. When the skeleton had been put out of action, they renewed their slow assault, not towards the family or the refugees in the van, but on the officer specifically. He retreated as they surrounded him, firing wildly into the swarm until his firearm clicked on empty. There was no chance to reload as he was yanked to the ground by the undead mob and devoured.
After witnessing the final moments of his comrades, the driver of the van kicked the vehicle into drive, only for it to slow to a crawl a heartbeat later as its headlights lit up an incoming wall of corpses. Kat thought she recognized, at the front of the horde, a small figure in a blood-spattered yellow raincoat. The bodies swarmed, crawling in through the open rear doors until the van and its occupants inside were enveloped in a mass of reaching limbs.
From their window three stories up, Kat and Sophia could easily hear the screaming.
-23-
Within the dumpster, Don’s thoughts were darker than the garbage pit in which he found himself. The sounds of the dead only inches away went on for hours, driving his mind into a realm of madness and bringing him to places he hadn’t been in a long, long time.
A strange man in bed with Mother.
An uncle’s hand, reaching beneath the blanket.
A puppy on a noose in the woods.
Like the stench of garbage, Don’s memories assaulted him. With each flashback, his body responded differently, and he felt himself transforming. His crotch stiffened and softened, his brow dampened with sweat, and his eyes blinked in the black, desperately seeking light.
While days and months and years passed through Don’s mind, the sounds of the dead outside quieted away to nothing.
-24-
Aboard the Federation ship, Defiant, Lieutenant Commander Dorian Sharpe fought to keep his eyes open in the warm comfort of the Captain’s briefing room. He and his team had already been awake for thirty-six hours, engaged in covert infiltration exercises off the Atlantic coast, when they had been ordered to abandon their war games and instead rendezvous with the Defiant on its way to Boston Harbor. Curiosity kept sleep at bay as he tried to imagine what could have been so urgent to merit him and his team being called in. He didn’t have to wait long for an answer, as the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Harig, walked into the room a few moments later. Sharpe and his team stood to attention at his entrance, and the captain greeted them by way of apology.
“Sorry for the wait, gentlemen,” Harig said. “I’ve just finished speaking with Command in preparation for this briefing.” He strolled to the head of the ovular conference table at the center of the room and slid into a chair. “At ease boys, make yourselves comfortable.”
With the operators seated, Harig continued. “I’ll get straight to the point. Sometime over the past eighteen hours, the northeastern seaboard was exposed to a biological or chemical agent that has resulted in the deaths of countless civilians – unofficial reports are putting the numbers in the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.” He paused briefly to let them digest the sheer scale of the disaster. “The contagion, whatever it is, has wreaked havoc on New York, Boston, and all the way up into Atlantic Canada and dozens of cities and towns in between.”
Harig cleared his throat and opened a manila folder. He pulled out a photograph, a black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged man in glasses, and slid it across the table to Sharpe. “Command has the media directing blame at the Frontier, but in truth, this is the man responsible. Dr. Emilio Neyra, head of research at a Command-funded highly classified weapons development facility in the Canadian arctic. He was working on a biological super weapon dubbed Project Stonemen.”
Sharpe took the photo and committed the man’s face to memory before passing it along to his men. While that went around, Harig pulled out another photograph from the folder, a satellite image of a desolate, snow-covered island surrounded by a dark sea. “The research facility is here on Aptok Island, northwest of Baffin Bay. It operates under the guise of a migratory bird research site. This rock is ground zero, gentlemen, from where the contagion is supposed to have originated. Command informed Neyra three days ago that he and his facility were being shut down and his work destroyed – too dangerous, you see? That was the last anyone has heard from him or anyone else at Project Stonemen.
Just before communications with the site went dark, however, there was one outgoing phone call from Neyra’s office to a journalist by the name of Thaniel Briends. The content of that conversation is as yet unknown and will remain unknown until Briends can be tracked down and questioned. That’s where you come in.”
Sharpe nodded, “His last known location?”
“Boston. Lives in Cambridge, works downtown at the New England Times. Here’s all we have on him right now.”
Harig slid the folder and its remaining contents across the table. Sharpe flipped it open to see a few newspaper clippings written by Briends, a copy of his driving record, a list of his current and previous addresses, and a few other miscellaneous public records that mentioned his name.
Nothing threatening and not much to go on.
Harig continued, “Without knowing wha
t caused Neyra’s agent to be released, whether it was deliberate or not, we have to consider all possibilities, including the possibility that Briends collaborated with Neyra, or at least knew what he was going to do. Either way, we need to know what was said in that conversation.”
“Okay,” Sharpe said, closing the folder. “So, Boston, then. What are we looking at, sir?”
Harig paused, then spoke bluntly. “All reports say it’s a shit-show. This contagion, virus, whatever it is – no one’s ever seen anything like it. There are reports of spontaneous insanity, cannibalism, mutant skeletons, and people coming back from the dead, of all things. I can’t make sense of it and Command isn’t being very forthcoming. It’s above my pay grade. But whatever it is, the reports are consistent enough to give me the chills. Here, take a look.”
Harig picked up the remote from the table and aimed it at the screen on the other side of the room. It flicked on to show the static blue video slide of the EBS, the Emergency Broadcast System used in the event of a national emergency that could only be activated with Command approval. A high-pitched tone of alarm was the sole audio accompanying the screen, with words that scrolled across the bottom alerting viewers to tune into a local news channel for more information. It took Harig a few clicks through blue-screen warnings before he landed on a channel with an actual person, a news anchor in the middle of a report.
[…authorities are calling these self-mutilated individuals the Primary Infected, though those fleeing the attacks have dubbed them ‘skeletals’, given their reformed appearance. These ‘skeletals’ who have self-harmed to the point of death, are described as hyper-aggressive, attacking any and all non-infected persons within the immediate vicinity, including family and friends, despite all efforts to communicate or reason with them. The biological agent by which these infected individuals undergo such an extreme transformation has yet to be identified by authorities, but witness reports suggest that it is highly contagious and can be passed on from the skeletals to their victims. These secondary victims, once exposed to the virus, are reported to undergo a similar change in their personalities and behavior as the primary victims, albeit their physical transformations are described as much less severe. While witness accounts…]
Harig brought the remote up again and muted the screen, stating; “He’ll go on and on, but won’t say much else – there isn’t much else to say at this point. What I can tell you though, from aerial surveillance over Boston at least, is that over the past couple of hours the streets are slowly being emptied. Fly-bys over infected zones in the immediate aftermath of the initial attack showed the streets as being packed full of the infected, skeletals and non-skeletals alike. Subsequent surveillance trips, however, show fewer and fewer of the things. It’s as if they are hiding,” he finished.
Sharpe heard Hyres, his chief and second-in-command, exhaling long and low next to him before speaking up. “Captain, how did the Primary Infected, these skeletals, become exposed to the contagion in the first place?”
“Unknown, Chief,” Harig answered, “but the ‘changing’, I suppose is the best way to call it, seemed to have happened en masse, with those infected individuals undergoing their transformations almost as one. I do not think there is a risk of primary exposure to yourselves, not at this point,” he said, answering the unasked question. “Since that first changing, there have been zero reports of self-mutilations, though witness accounts of skeletal violence against living humans are still coming in by the hundreds. I cannot stress this enough, these skeletals are exactly what that talking head described: hyper-aggressive and by all reports, intelligent the way an apex predator is intelligent. Do not let them near you, or you’ll end up a walking corpse.”
One of Sharpe’s men swore quietly from the other end of the table, and Sharpe silently agreed with the sentiment. “Sir,” he said to Harig, “You mentioned surveillance. I’m assuming there are plans underway to re-take the city?”
“That’s correct, Sharpe. As we speak, volunteers are being gathered for the largest aerial evacuation in human history. Come sunrise, the sky will be filled with rescue copters on their way to Boston and New York City. From there, they’ll work their way outwards, pulling out as many civilians as they can. At the same time, Federation troops will be amassing inland at the borders of known infected zones, while the Corps will be moving in from the coast. That’s where we are headed, towards Boston Harbor, to rendezvous with the Jaeger and deploy several detachments of corpsmen.”
Harig gave the team a few moments of silence to process everything. Sharpe looked up at the muted television to see a clip that must have been filmed earlier that day. As he watched, the female news reporter onscreen was tackled to the ground by the blurry figure of a skeleton. The cameraman must have been attacked too, as the view suddenly dropped sideways and the screen was filled with the sight of snarling teeth.
Harig cleared his throat, “We’ll be arriving at Boston’s outer harbor within two hours. Until then, I suggest you boys get some rest. You’re going to need it.”
-25-
Molly hadn’t slept well at all. None of her family had, she was sure. The things her husband and children had told her, about what they had seen in the woods – it was just too terrible for sleep.
After hearing about their encounters with the monsters in the forest, Molly had insisted that they all sleep together in the same room, in the den, by the fire, and close to the door for an easy exit. Jacob and Riley had taken the sofas while she slept on the floor. Next to the door, her husband dozed upright, his back pressed against the wall and his head angled into the corner. In his arms, cradled against his chest, was his shotgun. His snoring was loud enough to convince her that maybe he actually had been able to get some rest last night.
Not her, though. Molly had stayed up late into the previous evening listening to the old-timey radio they had inherited from Gabe’s grandfather, to the emergency newscasts that were updated every half hour. The cabin’s lack of a TV left it up to her imagination to fill in the visual voids the radio couldn’t.
The whole northeast coast under martial law.
Major cities like New York, Boston. Fallen.
Entire towns, including their nearby Darby, decimated.
Gabe stirred. “You up, hon?” he grumbled.
“Yes. Keep your voice down. The kids.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, muting himself a little.
“You were just asleep.”
“Yeah, but I was thinking too.”
She chuckled softly at his silhouette in the dim light, feigning exasperation, “Okay, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking we should go to the cave.”
The cave. It was where she and Gabe had had their first date more than ten years ago, when she had agreed to go hiking with him in the mountains that he loved. When they had stumbled across it, Gabe insisted they were the first ones to discover it. He had even shown her where they were on the map and true to his word, there was no charting of a cave there. They had entered the darkness together, a cut in the mountain which opened into a large cavernous room where massive rock formations hung from the ceiling like stone chandeliers. At the rear of the cavern, deeper into the mountain, a tunnel led down to an underground spring where they had filled their canteens with fresh mountain water.
Gabe had been laying it on thick, going on about naming the newly discovered cavern after her, when they had stumbled across a discarded beer can laying on the ground. She raised her eyebrow at the thing and Gabe had stammered in feigned surprise. “Okay, okay, some of the local guys know about this place.”
“Oh really, and do they also bring their dates here?” she had asked with mock chagrin. “I wonder what for?”
Gabe’s boyish grin at that moment had been enough to win him a second date.
“Why the cave?” Molly asked in the dim light, her focus back on the present.
“We’ll have fresh water there, from the spring, I mean. It’s
well hidden and can be easily defended.”
“Defended?” Molly snorted. “Defended, like from an invasion?”
Gabe hesitated for a moment, gathering his thoughts before speaking. “You didn’t see what we saw, Molly. Those ghouls out there… What people are becoming down in the cities… You heard the radio, there’s no running from this. The only thing we can do is dig in deep and defend ourselves. We need to find a position, fortify it, and wait for help. The cave would be perfect for that.”
It made sense, but Molly was hesitant. “Yes, but why can’t we do that here?” she asked, fearing she already knew the answer.
“Not enough provisions, for one. It’s too exposed; too many windows. We can’t see what’s coming out of that treeline out there,” he nodded to the window to the east that let in the early morning light. “There are too many risks if we stay here, Molly.”
Molly racked her brain for another argument, an alternative solution to leaving the cabin, but came up with nothing. She sighed, defeated. “Okay, the cave. But how?”
Even in the dim light, she could see Gabe smile.
Forty-five minutes later, Molly and her daughter Riley were loading water and canned goods into the back of the truck; while her son Jacob pulled bags of freshly butchered venison from the freezer, to be smoked and cured by Gabe once they arrived at the cave.
While Molly and the children worked, Gabe rummaged through the shit-shack – the loving name he’d given to the storage shed he’d built behind the cabin a few years back. He pulled out a chainsaw, camping supplies, jerry cans of fuel, and boxes of ammunition, among other necessities. Anything he thought might improve his family’s chances for survival in the next few weeks went into the growing pile. Then, when the truck was loaded down with everything the parents thought they might need, Molly tossed him the keys.
“Let’s get going.”
-26-
