by Chad Morgan
He sat sideways on a banana chair, his face in his hands, the gun sitting on a cheap plastic patio chair in front of him. He couldn’t cry when he was killing them, too much adrenaline pumping through him in a desperate and instinct-driven effort to stay alive, but he could cry for them now. He cried not for the monsters but for the children they used to be, as well as the child he had shot while on the police force.
Daniel raised his face from his hands and looked at the bodies littering the ground. If he didn’t look at their misshaped bodies and only focused on their doll-like faces, their toothy grins gone now that they were dead, Daniel could see the humanity they must have had once. The rational part of his mind kept telling him he had no choice, that whatever turned these poor kids into monsters was to blame and not him, but his guilt screamed at him. Even the fresh blood cooling on his skin or the pain from the fresh wound where one of them stabbed him couldn’t quiet it. He killed those kids. Massacred them.
“Now I’m killing kids,” he said aloud. “Oh, God, what did I do?”
Daniel opened the chamber and emptied the revolver of the spent bullets. When before his hands shook, now they were still as he loaded fresh bullets into the chamber. He had to force himself to kill children, something that his brain was wired to know was wrong despite the facts in front of him. His next victim, however, was much more deserving of execution.
Daniel didn’t notice the black, stagnant water start to ooze up from the drain at the bottom of the pool. Nor did he notice the tendrils from his infection creep up from under his bandages and slowly spread along his arm, or from across the hole in his stomach where the child-thing had stabbed him.
Daniel closed the chamber and stared at the gun in his hands. It felt light, almost inviting. Only when he started to raise the barrel to his mouth did his hands shake.
“If you give up on yourself,” a raspy voice came from his side, “you also give up on Bethany.”
Survival instincts overrode his despair. Daniel jumped to his feet and spun towards the voice, snapping the sheriff’s pistol away from himself and towards the new threat. Standing outside of arms reach was an old woman. Her clothes were a cloak of dirty rags, covering her head in a makeshift hood. Her face was weathered and covered in wrinkles. What little of her skin he could see under her hood was almost gray, her hair in unkempt white bushes. She stood in front of the muzzle with a patient smile.
“They weren’t children, you know,” she said. “Not human children, not anymore. What you did, Daniel, was not your fault. If anything, you’ve freed them from the abominations they were forced to become.”
Daniel held his stance, the pistol aimed at the old woman’s head, but if it bothered her she gave no sign. She walked along the dead creatures and, with gnarled fingers, brushed their hair to the side and closed their eyes. It was as if she was tucking them into bed.
“They know your fears,” she said. “They know your weakness, your inner shame, your hopes and dreams. They will use them against you.”
“Who are you?” Daniel asked.
“Fire,” she said, ignoring Daniel’s question. “It’s their greatest weakness. It’s very cold where they’re from. They’re like moths, they’re attracted to the heat, but the burn so easily . . .”
Daniel thought about the king of the abominations killing those nature creatures, and how after they had burst into flames they were set upon by more abominations. The monsters caught fire as well, but it was as if they couldn’t help themselves. They had to be near the flame.
He kept the gun trained on her. “You’re the old woman, aren’t you? The one the guy in the cell was talking about?”
“Anna took a huge chance on you,” she said, not looking at him.
“Took a chance on me how?” Daniel asked.
She turned to him, her eyes piercing him. “By killing herself.”
Daniel clenched his jaw and tightened his grip on the pistol. “You’re not making any sense.”
Daniel heard something wet behind him. He was about to turn, thinking he might have caught something in his peripheral vision, but the old woman pulled his attention back to her. “Anna left her diary for you, so you would understand?”
How long had the old woman been watching him? He had awoken to find the clinic door open, it was possible the old woman could have searched his pockets, but somehow Daniel suspected she had been watching him for much longer than that. The prisoner had known who he and Bethany were, said the old woman had told him. So how long had the old woman been watching him?
“Haven’t had time to read,” he said. “Been kind of crazy lately. Why don’t you give me the Cliff Notes version?”
“Bethany is the key,” she said. She walked towards him, a slow but deliberate pace that showed she didn’t care about the gun aimed at her. “The gate will be closed or opened. It all depends on you.”
Daniel’s patience was at its limit. “I’m not fucking around! What the fuck is happening in this town? I want a straight answer!”
“The last rite was never meant to be found,” she said. “But now they have it, and they can use the key to swing the gates forever open.”
That struck a chord, and Daniel thought about the video chat on the tablet left on his car’s hood. “They? The guy in the business suit, the one who took Bethany. He’s one of them, right? Who are they?”
The old woman was now just beyond arms reach, the muzzle of the gun pointing directly to her sternum when she stopped. She stood tall and defiant, and for a moment Daniel didn’t see an aged woman. She was virile and strong, but her face couldn’t hide the untold years of bearing some huge weight. Daniel saw that face in some of the veteran officers when he was a cop, the ones that weren’t so jaded as to stop caring, but carried the weight of all the times when they fought to make the world a better place and lost.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “There’s always people of power who want the one thing the demons from the other side can offer.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“More power,” she said. “Power beyond what they’re capable of gaining alone to feed their addictions. The true masterminds behind this are hundreds of miles away, but their proxies are the ones who have Bethany.”
“Where are they?” Daniel asked.
“It’s irrelevant,” she replied.
Daniel took two steps, closing the gap between them, and pressed the muzzle of the gun against her forehead. He yelled, “Where is my daughter?”
The old woman’s voice never wavered. She either didn’t believe Daniel would pull the trigger, or was so detached from reality she couldn’t comprehend the threat. “They can’t hurt her. They need her. But they can’t use her either. Not while you live, and not while you haven’t abandoned her.”
It wasn’t what Daniel wanted, but it was something. Bethany was safe. Daniel pulled back a couple of steps. He could see the impression the barrel left on her forehead, a perfect circle amidst the wrinkles and liver spots.
“You are in a unique position, Mr. Burns,” she continued. “Only you can do what needs to be done, but only if you are strong enough.”
“Do what?” Daniel asked, but when the old woman didn’t answer he shoved the gun back in her face, this time right between her eyes so she could see it staring back at her. “Do what?”
“The last rite,” she said.
Daniel backed away and lowered the gun. “Fuck off. You’re just a crazy old bitch. Get out of here before something eats you.”
“I’ve lived much, much longer than I should have, and I’ll live much, much longer still,” she said, her words soaked in regret, but when she spoke next there was a lilt that made Daniel shiver. “Your life, however, will be dangerously short if you do not become more observant.”
Before Daniel could ask what she was talking about, he felt something like a large tongue wrap around his ankle. Large pustules covered the thing. As it gripped him some popped, and yellow-white puss splashed over his leg
. It reeked of decay, the stench making Daniel gag, choking off the moment he had to escape. Before Daniel could recover, the large tongue yanked Daniel off his feet. His head hit the porous pavement of the edge of the pool before being lifted in the air. His thigh felt like it was going to be ripped out of the socket, and Daniel screamed in pain and fear. Hanging upside-down in the air, Daniel saw the old woman standing there. She watched him, looking up at his dangling from, but she made no movement. Other tongue-things flailed about, but they seemed to be repulsed from her like a magnetic force. She was as unafraid of the monster as she had been of the gun pointed to her head.
And then he was pulled under the water. Daniel was jerked under so fast he didn’t have time to take a breath, and his lungs fought him and tried to breathe the water. No longer fighting gravity, Daniel could contort his body and follow the tongues down to where they came out of the drain in the deep end of the pool, only now the drain was a giant toothy maw. It gnashed its teeth together, and beyond it was an inferno. Daniel could feel the water warming as the tongue pulled him closer to the waiting mouth.
Daniel aimed the pistol at the tongue pulling him down. He wasn’t sure it would fire underwater, but while the bullets did fire the water slowed them down and rob them of their power. The bullets hit the tongue and drew black blood, but instead of letting Daniel go it wrapped around him and squeezed. What little air he had in his lungs were crushed out of him. His lungs rebelled and inhaled the water. Daniel coughed it up and fought the instinct to inhale it again, but the edges of his vision were getting fuzzy. The tips of his fingers began to tingle, and numbness worked its way up his hands. His grip slacked and the gun fell. Daniel watched it tumble through the water towards the maw, his numb hands grabbing in vain for it. It was Daniel’s last chance for saving himself, and he saw it disappear past the clashing teeth. He strained to free himself, but with his gun gone, so was his fight.
Then the gun fired. And fired again. The bullets were cooking off in the fire of its belly, ripping into shards as they tore from the cylinders and into the inner gut of the beast. The tongue let go, and with its siblings, it buckled and waved in anger and pain. Daniel clawed for air, his muscles burning hope and desperation instead of oxygen. The surface should have been only a couple of feet at the most, but the bottom of the pool had sunken, stretching into another world. Daniel was knocked about by the multiple tongues waggling as another bullet cooked off, but he kept swimming up until his head finally broke the surface.
He sucked in a chest full of air, stretching his neck out to avoid taking in any of the dirty water. He pawed for the edge, dodging the pustule-covered tongues splashing around him. With shaking arms, he hoisted himself out of the pool, then stumbled to the backpack. He hooked the backpack strap with one arm and ran back towards the fence, but a large tongue-like tentacle crashed in front of him like a falling redwood tree. Pool chairs were flipped into the air or crushed under its titanic weight. Daniel skidded to a halt, his feet sliding on the wet pavement, then scurried in the other direction.
In front of him were twin glass doors that led into the apartment. Daniel bolted for the doors, dodging tongues slapping against the ground. He pulled the doors open and jumped inside, pulling them closed behind him just as the end of one of the tongues slammed against them. The glass fractured into spider web patterns but held. Daniel doubted it would have if the doors had been hit by the bulk of the appendage, but the doors appeared to be right at the edge of its reach. Daniel stood back from the door anyway, just in case.
The creature in the pool continued to flail, but Daniel could see the old woman standing by the fence not far from where the massive tongue-thing had crashed to the ground. She didn’t flinch as the tongues wiggled and crashed around her as if she knew they would never touch her. Daniel was half-tempted to run out after her, though whether to save her or strangle her he wasn’t sure, but the tip of another tongue slapped against the door, cutting itself on the glass and smearing black blood it. Daniel looked at her through the blood smear as she turned and walked out of view. Daniel hoisted the backpack onto his shoulder and ventured deeper into the apartment complex.
13
Across the entryway to the apartment were large French doors that led out to the street, but they were chained shut with a large padlock. The only other way out was the way he came in, from the pool where the monster’s tentacles still flailed about. He’d have to find another way out.
The apartment complex was a U-shape, with the patio and pool area in the middle of it. On one side of the front doors was the manager’s office, on the other side were the metal key-opened mailboxes for the tenants. Reading the numbers on the mailboxes confirmed what he previously thought, that there were three stories of apartments. Bolted to one wall was a map of the complex which showed stairwells at each corner. Across the walls, however, were deep gouges and cuts. He ran his fingers over the apartment’s wounds. These were single strokes, not the triple-slashes he had seen with the dog monsters. Something caused these he hadn’t seen yet. Below one of the deep gouges, the carpet was soaked with a huge puddle of blood. Red blood, not the black stuff that poured from the monsters. Human blood.
Daniel shivered, not from the carnage but from the cold. He was soaked, his bandages filled with the dirty water from the pool. With the backpack on both shoulders, he began unraveling his bandages as he started exploring the apartment. He had to get out of his wet clothes before hypothermia or worse set it, not to mention cleaning his dog bite out again. He checked the first door and found it locked. The second one gave a fraction of an inch, the door pushing against furniture piled on the other side. Daniel tried to peer inside as he dropped the last of his wet bandages on the floor. He couldn’t see anything, but he heard hissing and clicking sounds coming up to the door. Daniel froze as the thing on the other side seemed to be trying to smell him through the crack in the door. As quietly as he could, Daniel inched his way from the door.
The next few doors were the same, either locked or blocked, but when he reached apartment 107 the door swung open without effort. Daniel pulled out the lug wrench and the flashlight from the backpack. With the flashlight in his left hand and the lug wrench in his raised right hand, he entered the apartment with slow and practiced footsteps. He snapped around the corners the way he had been taught in the police academy, the lug wrench a poor substitute for a pistol but it was all he had. In the end, his careful search of the apartment for threats was wasted. The apartment was empty. He went back to the front door, closed it, and locked it. He felt the weight lift from his shoulders and he realized that, for the first time in a while, he was safe. He leaned against the wall and allowed himself a moment to close his eyes.
Rest time was over. He had things to do, and a little girl to find. He walked into the small kitchen and tried the tap, but instead of water, a greenish-brown muck rolled out of the faucet. He tried the refrigerator, but the stench almost made him retch and he slammed it shut. The power had been off long enough for the food to spoil, and amongst the cocktail of rancid smells, he recognized eggs and milk. Despite the nausea-inducing smell, his stomach growled. It had been at least a day since he last ate or drank, but Daniel thought he saw water bottles in his brief glimpse into the fridge. He took a deep breath and, covering his face with one hand, pulled open the refrigerator. Stacked on one side were several bottles of water. Daniel grabbed them quickly and slammed the refrigerator door closed. Too much of the stench had escaped from the refrigerator, and Daniel coughed and gagged as he waved it away. When Daniel could breathe again, he grabbed a dish rag and poured some water from one of the bottles onto it, then used the rag to wipe his face. When enough of his face was clean, he drank the remaining water from the bottle. From the second bottle, he washed out the dog bite.
The apartment was filled with old but clean furniture. It looked to Daniel that whoever had lived here was out of the house when this small part of the world ended. Judging by the bottles of prescription pills
he found in the bathroom, Daniel guessed an elderly person. He searched the pills for anything useful, but there were no antibiotics amongst them. The bedroom was small with a single bed, pictures covering the dresser and end tables, some black and white. There was a whole life here, but like every other life in this town, it had been consumed. This man, whoever he was, was gone now. Daniel wondered if he was missed. Did he have family or friends? Or had he outlived them all? Were there people outside of Shellington Heights wondering why they hadn’t heard from him? The last thought caused Daniel to shiver again – would they come looking for him?
Daniel opened the closets and started searching the clothes. Whoever lived here – had lived here – was a little bit larger than Daniel was, but at least they were dry and clean. He pulled off his wet shirt and dropped it into the corner with a wet slap. Looking at his bare abdomen, he saw the same black tendrils starting to spread from his fresh wound. Daniel put on a clean t-shirt and pulled a long-sleeve thermal shirt over it. Putting on clean underwear felt a little weird. Even though they were fresh from the drawer, it was someone else’s underwear, but it was better than sitting in his soaked pair. Most of the pants were slacks, but he found a pair of denim jeans that were more his style. It felt odd wearing another man’s clothes, but at least he was warm now.
Daniel found several candles and some matches in the kitchen drawers. He lit as many as he could find, filling the living room in a pale and flickering light. He sat on the couch and pulled the backpack to him. Shifting through the contents, he pulled out the boxes of bullets and threw them onto the coffee table, saying, “Won’t be needing those anymore.”
