She raised the paperweight. Already it felt heavier in her hands, growing more so by the moment. She held it by her right ear. She gritted her teeth, her lips peeled back to reveal a deathly snarl.
Just as she brought the paperweight down, the man on the couch turned.
She stumbled backward and dropped the paperweight. It shattered on the linoleum, exploded into a million glittering pieces.
A scream formed in her throat, but it stuck there, lodged.
This was not her mother’s boyfriend. This was her husband. It was Kurt Walton, the man she’d shared the last two decades with, the man who’d beat her, berated her, taken advantage of her, who drank and swore and spouted off about white power.
Except—it wasn’t Kurt Walton.
Not really. It was someone else. Something else. Almost as if it wore Kurt’s face as a mask.
The skin stretched over bumps and ridges. The cheekbones squirmed. The eyes swam, pupils drifting around the cornea like the contents of a lava lamp.
“What’s wrong, honey?” the Kurt-thing said. “What? You mad I hit your momma? She deserved it, Sky. All women do.”
Suddenly, the thing in front of her grew larger, ballooned, dwarfing Skylar.
She tried taking a step back, but her feet were bolted to the floor.
“You get out of line, you get hit. Simple as that, baby. You know it.”
“No,” Skylar said, her lips barely moving.
“Yes, honey. Yes!” The Kurt-thing’s face squirmed. A great ripping sound filled Skylar’s head, rattling around there, echoing. Pain. Pain.
The thing’s face split apart down the middle. Strings of skin and cartilage snapped, twanged. From this rip, tentacles uncoiled. They hung down past the thing’s chin. Dangled at his chest. They dripped with a blackish slime. They smelled.
Oh God they smell like death and decay and dirt and worms—
The Kurt-thing stepped over the back of the couch. From the bathroom, the crying turned to screams. All the while, Skylar could not move.
“Why don’t you come over here and give me a kiss, babe. Let me taste you,” the Kurt-thing said. “Let’s see if you taste like your momma.”
No no no no no no no—please!
But she held no control. The tentacles snaked toward her. They wrapped around her neck, the back of her head. Cold. So cold. Then they pulled her forward as the Kurt-thing’s maw opened and revealed rows and rows of needle-sharp teeth.
Skylar woke up screaming, her eyes filled with tears.
Kurt was already up. An open bottle of vodka sat between his legs. The gun given to them by Avery and Ray lay across his lap. He had taken it apart and was in the process of cleaning it.
“Morning,” he said. “Sleep well?” A ghost of a smile lingered on his face, which meant he obviously knew she hadn’t slept well.
Still, she said, “Yes,” as she ran a hand through her hair.
Her fingers glistened with sweat. Drinking had never been a big thing for her—she didn’t like the taste—but right then, she wouldn’t have minded a swig of Kurt’s vodka. Of course, if she took a drink, she would be drunk in no time. Zero tolerance for the booze. Plus, Kurt wouldn’t let her, anyway, and it was better for at least one of them to be lucid enough.
“What’s the plan today?” she found herself asking.
Kurt shrugged. “Surviving, I guess. We’ll head out in a couple hours, make our way south again. It’s too damn cold up here.”
She nodded. He was right about that. But part of her knew that it was cold everywhere. With the sun making fewer and fewer appearances, the world was bound to freeze soon enough. Then what? Would they freeze with the planet? Would the monsters?
Maybe, though…maybe it would be warmer down south. One could dream, couldn’t they?
Kurt pieced the rifle back together. He didn’t load it, though. When it was all together again, he aimed it at Skylar’s head and mimed pulling the trigger.
“BANG!” he said.
By the time they left the subway station and re-emerged on the surface, a heavy array of dark clouds filled the sky. Through the darkness, a meager bit of sunlight shone.
They found a main road and took it on foot, their skin permanently broken out in goosebumps. A chill wind whipped at their clothes. They walked on for an hour, passing wrecked cars and downed billboards. A minivan had been blown over and stepped on by some great beast, nearly severed in half. They passed the burned out husks of monstrous bodies. Boulder-sized skeletons with charred skin stuck to them. Detached claws. Teeth.
An hour into their journey, the ruined skyline of D.C. at their backs, Kurt pointed ahead.
“Smoke,” he said. “Look.”
Sure enough, drifting up into the dark sky was an even darker smoke.
“Not far,” he said. “C’mon.” He waved Skylar on.
She didn’t go.
“What if they aren’t nice?” she asked. The odds of them running into people who were as wholesome as those at Amsterdam Mall were not good, she supposed. The heat of anger brought color to her cheeks. Kurt had to go and mess up another good thing. What do you know?
Now he patted the gun hanging from his shoulder. His ‘man’s purse’ he called it. What a stupid name, Skylar thought.
“Honey, we ain’t nice people. They should be worried about us.”
“I don’t know.”
“I know. Now c’mon, before I have a reason to use this gun on you.” He gave her a wink to let her know he was only joking, but Skylar wondered if he truly was.
As they walked toward the smoke, Kurt rummaged through his bag and pulled out the vodka bottle. It was nearly three-quarters of the way gone. He downed the rest in one gulp, swished it around in his mouth, gargled it, then swallowed. The empty bottle, he chucked over his head. It hit the road and shattered. Then he was back to rummaging through his bag, looking for something else. A tiny bottle of Jack Daniel’s came next, like the kind they used to give on the airplanes. He broke the seal, sniffed it, and grinned.
“Want some?” He offered her the bottle.
That was when she knew he was drunk. He never shared when sober, and rarely did when he was this deep in the bottle.
She shook her head.
“More for me, then,” he said.
By the time they neared the source of the smoke, Kurt was off his ass, swaying back and forth, singing old country songs at the top of his shrill voice. Skylar kept telling him to be quiet—as politely as possible, so as not to set him off—but he wasn’t listening. He rarely ever did.
It was only when they stumbled upon the source of the smoke that he went completely quiet. He didn’t seem like he was even breathing.
Skylar herself certainly wasn’t. If not for the complete shock of it all, then for the acrid smell.
Just below the highway, in a small valley, lay a pile of smoldering bodies. Their bones were black, their clothes melted into them. It smelled like burned hair and cotton. A lingering metallic scent, almost coppery. That was all the burning blood, Skylar knew. Cloyingly sweet underneath the smell of smoke and copper, was the perfume-smell of burning cerebrospinal fluid. She had read about it a long time ago. Reading about it was one thing; actually smelling it…that was something completely different.
Vile was the word she would use to describe it.
But she also knew their noses were getting off easy. Had these burning corpses been what firefighters sometimes called ‘bloaters,’ the kinds of bodies already in the process of decomposition and swollen with terrible-smelling gases, they would be catching a far worse stink.
As Skylar’s mother used to say, ‘Thank God for small favors.’
After a moment, Skylar spoke. “Jesus Christ.”
“No, it wasn’t him,” came the answer from behind.
Her stomach flopped. The quickened blood pumping through her veins froze. She nearly had a heart attack.
Don’t turn around, she thought, as visions of her recent nightmare flooded h
er mind. Don’t turn around, and maybe they’ll go away.
But they didn’t.
This wasn’t a nightmare.
This was real life.
She turned around. What choice did she truly have?
Standing in front of her was a man more akin to Skylar’s mental picture of the Grim Reaper than an actual human. He was tall and thin, over six feet, but his skinny frame made him appear much larger than he actually was. He wore tattered clothes, a black denim jacket that hung loosely around him like the Grim Reaper’s robes. His skin glowed palely in the dark. On his face seemed to be a permanent, skeletal smile.
“Who the fuck are you?” Kurt asked.
Hearing her husband’s rudeness felt like a stab to the heart. She could tell just by looking into this stranger’s black eyes that he would not be one to look the other way.
“Don’t worry who I am,” the man said.
Kurt stepped forward. He was tall himself, but he paled in comparison to the stranger’s height. “I don’t worry, but I asked you a question, friend.” He poked the stranger in the chest. And Kurt quickly recoiled, screwing his face up in revulsion. Whatever he’d felt beneath the stranger’s jacket was something he didn’t particularly like. Skylar couldn’t imagine what squirming things lay under the denim. Her imagination kicked into overdrive. She suddenly wanted to scream.
“You do not know much in the way of politeness, do you?” the stranger said. He brushed at the spot where Kurt had touched him. “Perhaps you need someone to teach you manners.” He pointed behind them, at the smoldering remains of the humans. “These people did not know their manners. I tried to teach them many times over, but they just didn’t want to learn.” He leaned forward, spoke in a whisper. “I’m sure you will be more receptive.”
Kurt was speechless. So was Skylar.
The stranger continued, “If you want to go on your way, you will hand over your bag, your shoes, and your jackets.”
The speechlessness didn’t last. Kurt’s face turned red. “Are you threatening me?”
The stranger shook his head. “No, I’m not. I’m giving you a choice. You can live or you can die.”
Kurt raised his rifle. Reflexively, Skylar stepped back. She felt like crying. In fact, tears were already streaming down her face, but the cold wind had rendered her flesh too numb to feel them.
The stranger didn’t react much to the pointed gun.
“You will want to put the gun down, friend,” he said.
“You’ll want to make me,” Kurt replied.
The man’s skeletal grin widened. He looked away from Kurt, at the surrounding trees.
A breeze blew the stench of the bodies into Skylar’s nose, and she wanted to vomit.
Rustling behind them. Footsteps. Cracking twigs and fallen branches.
Skylar turned, telling herself not to, and saw two more equally skeletal grins floating in the darkness. The grins were attached to men, of course, but the nightmare feeling of seeing those white teeth in the shadows wouldn’t go away.
“We are three and you are two. Your woman is armed but incapable of using her weapon, and you, friend, are inebriated,” the stranger said as the others crowded closer.
They stank of sweat and gasoline, overwhelmingly. One of them ran a cold finger down Skylar’s cheek. She shivered and nearly cried out.
“Don’t touch her!” Kurt yelled.
“Oh, I’ll do more than touch her,” another stranger said. He was bald, wearing a yellow scarf around his neck.
“Nothing bad will come of you two unless you cooperate,” the Reaper said. “We are only trying to survive, just as you are. You cannot fault us for that, can you? I think not.”
Kurt replied, “Then you won’t fault me for this!”
He turned the gun up and pulled the trigger. The sound shattered Skylar’s eardrums. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, expecting to see the Reaper blown into a million pieces, all blood and brains, she saw nothing like that.
He was standing in the same exact spot as before, his face impassive. Nothing had changed.
“I would be more careful if I were you,” the Reaper said. He snapped his fingers.
Rough hands grabbed Skylar around the waist. She screamed, finally, but the scream was cut off before it could hit its maximum.
Kurt shouted as the gun was pried away. He flailed and swung his fists, but connected with no one.
The Reaper stood with his hands behind his back, watching.
Next thing Skylar knew, she was on the ground, looking up at the strangers huddled around her. One of them took the bag off her back. Fished the gun from her back pocket. The hand lingered there, and she tried ripping away from it, but without any success.
“Let me go!” Kurt was yelling. “Let me go!”
One of the men had him pinned down, knee in the middle of his back, as the other now upturned the contents of his bag. All of the tiny bottles of alcohol clattered on the cracked highway.
“A drunk,” the Reaper said. “I knew, I could smell it on you, but I did not know it was that bad.” He smiled. His teeth looked sharp—sharper than before.
Almost inhuman, Skylar thought.
“My father was a drunk,” the other man said.
He had long, greasy hair. Part of his ear was missing. The eye on the same side of his face the missing ear wasn’t was milky, as if he’d survived a grisly accident.
“You’re a drunk, too,” the bald man wearing a scarf said to his companion.
“Stop your squabbling,” the Reaper said.
The man with the missing ear opened a small bottle of Captain Morgan and downed it. “Ah, that hits the spot. Been too long. Life without rum is no life at all!”
They continued going through the contents, shifting them around with their dirty fingernails. Then they came for Kurt’s and Skylar’s coats, stripping them roughly from their bodies. Next came the shoes.
Skylar didn’t put up a fight. She knew what happened when you put up a fight against men the likes of these.
The cold knifed through her sweater, through her wool socks. As the man with the scar pulled her left shoe off, his hand lingered. He looked at her with shiny eyes and a sickening smile on his face. He began to run his fingers over her foot, back and forth.
Breaking her rule, Skylar shuddered at his touch and kicked out at him. She struck his sternum with a good amount of force. The man’s arms pinwheeled as he tried regaining his balance.
“Hey, you fuckin’ bitch!”
One thing came to her head then. She would die out here. Be it from the Reaper or the man with the scar or the man with the scarf or from the monsters or from the elements—Or my husband—she would die.
No, her mind said. Stay strong. Be tough.
The scarred man came at her, his hands raised. Skylar skittered backward, moving as if in a dream. She wasn’t fast enough. The other man, the one with the scarf, and even the Reaper were laughing. It was a sound like the shrieks of creatures, and Skylar couldn’t believe that men like these could be a part of her species. Monsters. They were monsters, as bad as the alien beings that had invaded Earth.
Cold hands seized her around the neck. She thought she was crying out, but it was barely audible. The man’s grip was too tight. Stars exploded at the corners of her vision.
This was it. She was going to die. She was going to be choked out in the middle of a highway she didn’t know the name of.
“Stop!” Kurt shouted. His voice could barely be heard over the rush of blood pounding in her ears. “Let her go!”
But the man only squeezed Skylar’s neck harder. She tasted blood in the back of her throat. The stars dimmed, and blackness began to invade the world, a deeper black than that of the sky.
“Stop! I know where there’s a ton of supplies. I know a safe place!” Kurt continued yelling.
Dimly, Skylar thought, Oh no. Not the mall, Kurt. Don’t kill them on account of me.
And what an odd thought that was. Part
of her, though, didn’t want to continue on. Didn’t want to keep living in a world that was dying, that was pretty much dead. She believed in a heaven—not necessarily a Christian or Catholic Heaven, but a heaven nonetheless. Of course, that also meant she believed in Hell, but if Hell was real, it was this putrid existence she was currently living.
“Stop,” the Reaper said in an oily voice, and all at once, the pressure on her neck disappeared.
She fell to the road, not even realizing that the scarred man breathing raggedly and standing over her had lifted her at least six inches off the ground.
Skylar brought a hand to her neck. The skin was tender and swelling already. She would have a nasty bruise. But she was no stranger to bruises.
The scarred man lunged at her, feigning a hit, then backed away.
Just kill me, she thought. Get it over with, damnit.
All eyes were on Kurt. The man with the scarf around his neck held a gun to the back of Kurt’s head. Kurt was on his knees, trembling. He looked stone-cold sober. Skylar couldn’t remember a time he had looked that way. Any mental image she brought up of Kurt Walton was a Kurt Walton that held a beer or a bottle of liquor in his hand, a needle in his arm, white powder on his nose; this mental image stank of booze and smoke and stale tobacco, his eyes were bloodshot and drooping, hair disheveled.
“I’m serious,” Kurt said. “I know a place. It’s fortified, big, tons of food and water and weapons.”
The Reaper folded his arms over his chest. Skylar had to look away from his eyes; the stare he gave was that of fire.
“Where is it?”
“I’ll show you,” Kurt said. “Let us live, and I’ll show you.”
The two others looked to the Reaper, waiting for his answer.
“Stand up,” the Reaper said to Kurt.
Kurt did.
“How far?”
“A few miles east. It’s a mall. Are you from around here?”
The Reaper shook his head.
“Then let me show you. It’s where we came from. There’s three men and two women. They’re armed, but not always. Bunch of pussies, too.”
Beneath: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 4) Page 8
