The Last Rite

by Chad Morgan

  Daniel searched the station, ignoring the snarling thing in the cell trying in vain to kill him, but keeping in mind not to get too close. In one overturned desk, he found several boxes of bullets, but they were the wrong caliber. He stacked them to the side in case he found a matching gun and kept looking. In another desk, he did find a couple of boxes of matching ammunition for the police revolver. He opened one box, pulled out six bullets, and reloaded the revolver. It was weird, holding the loaded revolver and feeling relief after years of avoiding them. What was the saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Now he and the gun had a common enemy, and they shared an unspoken truce.

  It was a bit awkward getting the boxes of bullets, the flashlight, and Bethany’s doll all in one arm but he managed, leaving his right arm free to hold the gun. His left arm complained, the dog bite aching and burning, especially when he twisted his wrist in an odd way to aim the flashlight. He started to leave when he heard the prisoner snarling at him. He looked at him, looked at the message scrawled on the concrete bricks in the back of the cell. Daniel thought he could see a pleading look in that one eye, the last part of him that might still be human.

  Kill me, please, it said.

  The monsters he killed before had attacked him, and they were just that – monsters. This thing in the cell used to be a human being. Maybe all the monsters used to be human beings, he didn’t know, but the one in the cell undeniably was. Daniel had killed only one person in his life, and like with the monsters he had done it to preserve his own life. He had never picked up a gun since, until now. The monster screamed and howled. What was the more merciful answer?

  Daniel fired. The first shot hit the thing center mass like he was taught at the police academy, aiming for the largest target. The monster didn’t go down, however, and thrashed in the cell, spewing the black blood everywhere in front of him. Daniel fired again, but the second chest wound was as non-lethal as the first. The third bullet punched a hole in the monster’s forehead as the back of his skull exploded. The black blood splattered over his last desperate message, and Daniel made a silent prayer that he had done the right thing.

  The squeals of the monster dying were still echoing in his mind as he walked the streets of Shellington Heights. He moved away from the highway and walked deeper into the town. He thought searching for Bethany in the small town wouldn’t be too hard, but the town was proving to be larger than he first thought. It was hard to tell in the fog, but he could see store fronts stretching out of a least a couple of blocks in either direction. There were no major buildings or landmarks that he could make out through the heavy fog, so there was no telling how big the town was, but the fog made it seem like it stretched out forever. The fog pressed down on him like it weighed a thousand pounds and it was all on his shoulders, an acre-wide wet blanket that blocked out the sun and muffled all the sound. Daniel walked on with only the dying monster’s squeals in his memory to listen too.

  Along the streets were small shops, some with residences on top of them, many with hand-carved wooden signs hanging on the doors and windows. The buildings were either wood paneling or brick, none of the stucco he would see in suburban homes near LA or the towers of glass and steel from downtown. The lampposts looked to have been converted to electric from old gas lamps. Daniel could have believed the town was lost in time as well as from the rest of the world until he found the backpack.

  The backpack was modern polyurethane-coated nylon that was almost the same color as the fog. Daniel might have missed it if not for the zippers, which was almost the same orange color as the safety vests roadwork crews would wear. Daniel put down the boxes of bullets, the doll, and the flashlight as he started to empty out the half-dozen pockets and pouches of the backpack. Opening the largest pocket, he pulled out what looked like an elementary school math book. Daniel thumbed through the worn hard cover book and couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the owner. He couldn’t think about it, there was only one child that mattered to him now. He didn’t have the luxury to mourn for children he never met. Now empty, he pulled the tire iron from his belt and slid it into the largest pocket, then added the flashlight. He filled one of the smaller pockets with the boxes of bullets. Then he pulled out Anna’s diary from his coat pocket.

  The diary weighed more than that of the paper and bindings now. Ms. Garcia said they found it after Anna committed suicide. It was still something he was struggling to wrap his mind around. He flipped through the book, looking at the tidy penmanship degrade to a hectic scrawl a little bit more with each turn of the page. Pages after pages were full of sketches of the horrors that had haunted Anna, some he now recognized, some he hadn’t seen yet. That made him shiver, thinking there was more waiting for him. He closed the diary and shoved it into the backpack.

  He held up Chrissy and looked in her sewn-on plastic eyes. He had promised Anna he wouldn’t let anything happen to Bethany, but Anna had known better. It was already too late. The promise was broken before he made it. She had known. It had to be some trick of the subconscious trying to sneak information to his conscious mind. Some part of him knew that wasn’t true, a small irrational part that, faced with mutant dog monsters and walking bushes, was growing louder. There was a new reality, and he had to adapt or die. He shoved Chrissy into the backpack.

  With the backpack zipped up and on his back, and the loaded revolver in his hand, Daniel was feeling more capable of dealing with this damn town. It felt like that to him, too, that it was the town he was fighting against. The monsters were just drones or antibodies or something, but the town had trapped him here, taunted him. The more he thought about it, the more it felt right. How else could the clinic door open without him hearing? The town itself was against him. That was an irrational thought, but he was now in an irrational world.

  Daniel walked by an electronics store. The televisions in the window were only a couple of years out of date, mostly high-definition screens but one or two of the newer ultra-high definition sat on display. Daniel thought how weird they looked in the window that was probably built a hundred years before the first television was invented. The window was smashed, and most of the TV screens were cracked. In a way, that unnerved Daniel even more. In Los Angeles, you have electronics sitting in a window and the window breaks, you soon have a bunch of missing electronics. Whenever this window broke, the people had higher priorities than looting, if people were still around by then.

  Daniel turned away from the blank television screens, so he never saw them come to life behind him, first with a burst of static, then each screen filled with a single large eye. The eye tracked Daniel as he walked away, then the screens all died at once.

  Daniel continued through the empty town. The silence was maddening. Even his own footfalls seemed muffled and distant. Daniel read about sensory deprivation tanks, about how people hallucinated when devoid of all stimuli. Some people in LA did that as a drug-free way to have a trip, but he wondered if the town was doing it now as some sort of phycological warfare. He found himself missing the constant hum of traffic, the far away cry of a siren, and all the other ambient sounds of Los Angeles. Sure, the city was crowded and noisy and dirty, but it was alive. Shellington Heights was alive in a new, alien way, but it was as silent as death, so when the trashcan tipped over it rang out like church bells.

  Daniel spun towards the rattling trashcan, aiming the revolver. The round metal trashcan rocked on its side between two buildings, its rotting contents spilled on the streets. Daniel called out, “Is someone there?”

  Daniel heard the slapping of bare feet against the pavement. He followed the sound with the barrel of the gun, his finger shaking on the trigger. His heart thumped hard against his sternum, and he was breathing harder than after running a marathon. The face of a small child peeked out from the alleyway and blinked at Daniel, who couldn’t pull his aim away fast enough. His breath wouldn’t slow, though, the thought of shooting another kid . . . He shook the thought away.

  “Hey,” h
e called out to the child. “What are you doing here? Are you okay?”

  The child was androgynous, with long black hair that made him think of the child as a she, but who knows how long the child had been out alone. Other than the long hair, there was no hint of gender. Only her head was visible, so there wasn’t even a dirty dress or t-shirt to hint at what bathroom she used. Her face - Daniel couldn’t think of the child as an “it”- was covered in dirt and grime over what might be a pretty face once it was washed. She looked at Daniel and ducked back into the alley until only her eyes and the top of her hair was visible.

  Daniel thought the child must be terrified, first from surviving the town full of monsters all alone, then she meets the first real person in who knows how long and he aimed a gun at her. Kneeling, he reached out with one hand and tried to coax her out like she was a lost cat. “No, don’t be afraid. It’s okay.”

  The child’s head slowly rose from the alley. Daniel smiled at her, beckoning her forward.

  “It’s not safe here,” he said, reaching out for her. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  Daniel thought about how Bethany’s small, delicate hand felt when he held it in his. Maybe it was paternal instincts, but there was something about that tiny hand in his that made him feel protective and strong. He opened his palm to take the child’s hand in his. Instead, a large claw swiped down at him. Daniel jerked his hand out of the way in time to see the claw slam down and crack the concrete sidewalk. The child thing crawled out of the alley, a mix-match of limbs and claws grafted on a child’s body. It’s smile widening until it was literally ear to ear, it bared its many rows of hungry crooked teeth. Then the thing laughed in a way that crawled up Daniel’s spine. Its laugh was like it’s body, a child’s laugh that was twisted and distorted and dark. It crawled out of the alley with slow and careful steps, and Daniel could see it’s bizarre mix-matched limbs. Like the other monsters, it looked like it was made of spare parts, but whatever made it didn’t know which were arm sockets and which were for the legs. They were twisted around so their limbs arched up like a crab. The thing looked at him with the wide, loving eyes of a child, even while it’s gleaming teeth clicked against themselves in its grin.

  Daniel raised the pistol, willing himself to squeeze the trigger, but the gun had turned to stone. He couldn’t make the trigger move as the child-thing stared at him with those wide eyes and even wider mouth. Before he could fire, he heard the laugh again, but from behind him. No, above . . . no, it was coming from all around him. Too loud and too different each time to be an echo, Daniel spun around to see those child-things emerging from windows and alleyways. Some of them crawled down the walls of buildings like spiders. A quick head count told Daniel there were more of them than he had bullets in the gun. Even if each shot was a fatality, they’d get him while he reloaded. Daniel ran.

  He could hear the slapping of bare palms and feet against the pavement, the clicking of their tiny teeth, and those damn laughs chasing behind him. Daniel ran hard, keeping the gap between them consistent, but he knew he couldn’t run forever. He’d tire before too long, and then they would be on him. He resisted the urge to shoot wild. The bullets were in his backpack and he wouldn’t be able to fish them out and reload unless he stopped running. That’s if he could pull the trigger. Those damn eyes, those damn, pleading eyes.

  Coming down the street, a chain-link fence sitting atop a waist-high brick wall emerged from the fog. The cross street angled down, and as he got closer he saw a large building behind the fence. Daniel ran harder, increasing the gap between him and the child-monsters. Reaching the fence, he threw the backpack over and then hopped it with ease, having hopped enough fences in his police training. Landing hard on the other side, something yanked him against the fence by his coat. He craned his neck to see the child things grabbing at him through the chain links, trying to raise him back over the fence. Daniel squirmed and twisted until he slipped out of his coat. He dropped back to the ground as the child things pulled the coat over the fence. They tore at it like dogs tearing into a fox. Daniel started pulling out the boxes of bullets from the backpack when the child-things realized the coat was empty. They turned back to the fence. Then they began to climb. With their odd and twisted limbs, it was awkward for them, but they began climbing over themselves like ants.

  Daniel aimed the pistol. “Stay back! I’ll shoot!”

  His voice cracked as he said it. One of the child things paused and looked at him with its wide eyes as if to say You don’t want to shoot ME, do you? The gun shook in Daniel’s hand. The thing didn’t just look like a child, it looked like that child.

  Then he was back in that alley in his police uniform, chasing after an unknown suspect to a dead end. “Freeze!” he had shouted. “Turn around slowly.”

  The suspect had turned, showing his young face, the same face as the one staring at him now through the chain link fence. How could it be the same face? The young boy held out a gun, but Daniel was disarmed by his innocent grin. Daniel lowered his gun then, and the memory made him lower his gun now. The child fired. Daniel felt the bullet rip through his stomach . . . no, he was feeling the claw piercing his abdomen. Daniel looked down to see a claw about an inch into his stomach, right where the young boy had once shot him. Daniel backed up, pulling the claw out of him, but when he was in uniform he fell to the ground. He had scuttled away behind a dumpster, but the young boy followed him, raising his gun. Daniel raised his own, just as he raised it now, and repeated what he had said to that young boy all those years ago.

  “Please, don’t make me shoot!”

  In that alley not so long ago, the young boy had cocked his pistol.

  The chain-link fence rattled as the first child-thing climbed over and landed in front of Daniel, readying to strike.

  Back then, in that dirty alley, Officer Daniel Burns fired on the child.

  In the town of Shellington Heights, Daniel fired at the child-monster. The thing’s head exploded in a mass of black blood, chunks of what looked like mold, and bits of skull. Daniel screamed as he fired as if every bullet that hit one of those child-things were ripping through his heart, and in a way, they were. He emptied out the pistol and took down three of those things as they tried to climb the fence, but a fourth clambered over the bodies of its fallen comrades and hopped over the fence while Daniel was reloading. It leaped at him as Daniel closed the cylinder, but he dodged out of the way and fired off a shot while the creature was in mid-air. The dying child-monster screamed like a hungry infant as the body slammed into the ground in a wet-sounding slap.

  Daniel emptied the gun again, taking down two more. He knelt and grabbed one of the boxes of bullets, shaking the bullets into his palm like they were theater candy, ignoring the ones spilling onto the ground. His hands shook. The bullets felt so small now as he threaded them in the cylinders, but he got the gun loaded and aimed at the leaders of the pile. He took out the ones closest to climbing over. After six shots, four more were down, but the last three never paused to mourn their crying brethren. They climbed over the dead like a biological ladder as Daniel tried again to reload. Daniel’s hands shook so badly, however, he dropped the box. The bullets scattered across the ground.

  “Fuck!” he screamed.

  Daniel grabbed for the bullets on the ground. For every one he got his fingers on, three more were pushed away and rolled out of reach. He could hear the bare slap of palms and feet as the child monsters landed on his side of the fence, but he didn’t look up. It didn’t matter. He knew they were there, and seeing it would only take precious seconds away from loading the gun. He kept working on putting the bullets into the gun until it was full. Only then did he raise the gun. He took out one child thing while the second leaped into the air at him. It fell on him, and Daniel fired again while the thing landed on him, forcing him to the ground, but the thing was dead. Daniel pushed the thing off him and got to his feet.

  One last child monster landed on his side of the fence. Daniel w
alked toward it, the gun aimed at its head when the child-thing looked up at him. For a moment, the monster’s face was that of the child it must have been once. It looked up at Daniel with wide-eyed fear. Daniel froze while the child-monster looked at the dead members of its pack, searching for a living one, but Daniel had killed them all. It looked up at Daniel with pleading puppy-dog eyes, its mad grin shrinking down to something more human. Daniel lowered the pistol, but it wasn’t shaking as much anymore. He looked at the thing coldly, and the child-thing looked up at him, its brows up and cheeks full as if to say, “thank you.” Daniel wanted to believe those eyes, but there were almost a dozen bleeding reasons why he shouldn’t. His skepticism was rewarded when the child monster bared its teeth and lunged at Daniel.

  Daniel snapped up his gun and fired a single shot. The things head blew apart, and it fell to the ground in a squelch.

  12

  The bodies of the things that used to be children bled out over the ground, most of them piled up on the other side of the fence, a ramp of bodies a few had managed to use to get over. Those were lucky enough to die on the other side of the fence, his side of the fence.

  After hopping the fence, Daniel was too concerned with fighting for his life to take in his surroundings. He didn’t care now, but grief didn’t demand as much attention as impending death. He absorbed his surroundings passively, like a visual osmosis. The fog still hid his surroundings, but the pool beside him was empty except for the very bottom of the deep end. Sprinkled around the pool were an assortment of patio furniture, some of them overturned and neglected. Around him in a U-shape was a brick building, either an apartment complex or a hotel Daniel guessed or would have if he cared.