by Matt James
And the footprints are everywhere.
I’m not sure how old the impressions are, but there are so many of them that most have mushed together. Some are barefoot, and some aren’t, still wearing the shoes they had on when they mutated.
A mob of Unseen ankle biters is something I don’t ever want to see. It seems that the children who’ve turned and survived and call this area home have fled the cities and settled in the woods. I know from experience that they prefer the cover of night and the relative safety of the shadows. And it’s only relatively safe within the trees because nothing is one-hundred-percent safe anywhere.
* * *
“Look-out Moun-tain,” Hope reads, carefully enunciating each word. “Wel-come to Ru-by Falls.” She looks up at me. “There’s a waterfall inside the building?”
“Nope,” I reply, happy that she’s moved past the incident with the chipmunk.
“Where is it then?” she asks.
I point a finger at the ground beneath the visitor center. “It’s deep underground.”
“Beneath the mountain?” Hope asks eyes wide.
I nod. “Cool, right?”
Hope shakes her head. “No way! I bet it’s scary down there—like super scary!”
I try not to laugh, but realize that she has a point, regardless if she only means the dim, dank, claustrophobic tunnels and not what might be lurking within them. To a seven-year-old, the dark is evil enough. Now...? I can’t imagine what’s going through Hope’s head. A kid’s imagination is already insanely overactive. Mix that with real-life horrors, and you get a cocktail that I wouldn’t even try.
My younger self would’ve. That dude was fucking nuts.
Cravens Terrace takes us around to the northern end of Lookout Mountain, right in between the Tennessee River to the north and Ruby Falls to the south. Besides the occasional body or bloodstain, the surrounding landscape is beautiful. Tennessee in the winter is something to behold if you haven’t experienced it yourself.
“In we go,” Dad mutters, looking none-too-pleased. He already has his shotgun pressed deeply into his shoulder.
He leads the way to the front door and scales the short flight of concrete steps. I’m right behind him with all three of the ladies bringing up the rear. Mom has taken up the full-time job of watching our asses seriously. More than any of us, she keeps Jill and Hope in front of her every step of the way. Even Jill isn’t joking around right now. She has one of Hope’s hands clutched in her left, and her revolver held firmly in her right.
We enter through what’s called the “castle.” If you look it up online, you’ll see exactly what I mean. It literally looks like a miniature stone castle with vines growing up its front façade. I sneer when I take a closer look at the growth, though. They aren’t a deep shade of green like I thought they were when first seeing them from the road. Ugh. They’re a dark copper-brown, stained with blood. I turn around and descend the front stairs and step back out onto the sidewalk in front of the building. Looking up, I confirm that the peak of the castle’s tower is similarly stained. It’s slight, but the blood is there.
I’ve been to the top of the five-story-tall structure before. If I’m not mistaken, you can see the dark waters of the Tennessee River, the southern end of Moccasin Bend, and downtown Chattanooga from up there. I face northeast, toward the water, and visualize the path we’ll take.
Well, the one we’ll try to take.
If we can find a car, we can follow I-24 around the southern bend of the Tennessee River and then hopefully circumvent Chattanooga. I really don’t want to have to stop there. Over the last few weeks, we’ve, for the most part, avoided densely populated areas. I’d like to continue that trend for a little while longer.
The biggest problem with I-24 is that it sits between a city and a chief water source. I can’t imagine a scenario where we won’t come across some sort of trouble along the way. Animals need two things to survive: Food and water.
And we’ll be right smack in the middle of both.
“Think happy thoughts, Frank,” I say to myself.
“Hey,” I turn and find Jill holding open the door, “you coming?”
“Yeah,” I reply, scaling the steps again. Before I go inside, I give the scenery behind me another quick look-see.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I take my eyes off the river and find Jill staring at me.
“Nothing,” I say, patting her hip as I pass by. “You know me…just thinking of the next step.”
She playfully slaps my butt and closes the door.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, okay? We need you focused on the here-and-now, not a future that might not happen.”
I’m pretty sure I’ve said something similar to that in the last month. Regardless, she’s right. There’s no need to think about what might come if you don’t live long enough to see it.
The Ruby Falls atrium is one thirty-foot, open room and it features a beautifully painted mural of its namesake, “Ruby Falls.” There’s an ATM machine just inside the door to my left, and its screen is lit. There’s power, but not a lot of it. The lights above the rear ticket counter are out as are the lights inside the gift shop to our right.
A few of the breakers must’ve tripped.
There are also twin streaks of blood circling around behind the front desk. Someone was dragged behind the desk and killed.
Silently, we head for the gift shop. I keep my body in between the ticket counter and Hope the whole time, somehow thinking that I can block her from seeing it—any of it. It’s ridiculous, I know. There are bodies all over the place. Actually, they are only remains now.
Scavengers have come out of the woodwork in full force now, doing what they do best: Scavenging. There was an odd delay of nonforaging right after everything happened. I really noticed it back in Wellington when the first vultures finally appeared overhead. Until then, they had stayed away. But the buffet was too plentiful to ignore any longer. Whereas most of us humans understand that’ll we’ll be getting another meal when needed, animals, especially wild ones, don’t have the privilege of that kind of foresight.
In the low light of the gift shop, Jill stops and breathes in deep, and I know why. I’ve already checked for them. There aren’t any bodies in here. Besides this place being seemingly empty during regular operation hours, the room feels almost normal at the moment.
Jill sighs. “Coffee…”
Or it’s the fact that there’s an illuminated fridge filled with sodas and iced coffee drinks on the back wall. It’s as if she’s a moth to a flame, forever entranced. She may not have even looked at the shop itself—just the coffee.
I smile when she rushes forward, and flings open the door. One by one, she hands the adults one of the drinks. I gladly take the beverage and greedily guzzle down two-thirds of it. In unison, the four of us proclaim our delight with quadruple “ahhhs.”
“Chocolate milk!”
Hope, stuffed animal in one hand, is bouncing up and down, pointing at a bottle on the bottom shelf with the other. She looks up at me and smiles, waiting for me to give her the all-clear. It’s not a rule that she can’t have anything whenever she wants, she’s just really polite and knows that taking things usually isn’t right.
“Dig in, kiddo.”
“Yay!” she squeals, ripping the drink from its place, but after a couple of seconds, she stomps her foot and pouts.
“What’s the matter, honey?” Mom asks.
Hope holds up her cow-printed prize, eyes watering. She sniffs. “I can’t open it.”
My mother’s heart visibly melts, and she happily helps out the girl. I grin and shake my head and take in the rest of the rectangular room, sipping my drink as I do.
Damn, this is good!
We’re currently near the rear wall. The fridges are perfectly centered on that wall, a perfect spot in which to see them from the entrance of the gift shop. Instant moneymakers, like the gum and candy at a grocery store checkout.
AKA, i
mpulse buys.
Up against the left-hand wall are the cash registers and additional tourist information—pamphlets and whatnot.
Nope.
The middle of the gift shop holds all kinds of trinkets and souvenirs, including t-shirts and refrigerator magnets.
Nope again.
The wall to our right is full of snacks.
Bingo.
Jill looks at me, and I tip my chin toward the find. Less than ten seconds later, we’re all shoving anything we can fit inside our backpacks—even Hope. Having a smart kid with us is a blessing too. She understands the gravity of our situation and forgoes the candy, minus one bag of yellow M&M’s. Peanut… Good choice! Instead, she, like us, focuses on the bags of trail mix and individually wrapped protein bars. Most of them have chocolate in them either way, so she’ll still get her fix.
“Why is there so much food?” I ask talking to myself more than to anyone in particular.
“Does it matter?” Dad asks back.
“Yes,” I reply, “it does. All of this shouldn’t be here after all this time. You’d think someone else would’ve come across this stash by now.”
“Maybe they don’t like healthy stuff?” Hope asks, loudly munching on her candy.
I roll my eyes and look back out into the atrium—back to the streaks of blood. I need to see what I can find. There has to be a reason why no one has come here. A foreboding feeling washes over me. Maybe whoever has been here hasn’t left.
“Hang out here for a second,” I say, stepping away.
“I’m coming too,” Jill says. Before I can argue, Jill turns to the others. “Keep an eye on Hope, will ya?”
“Of course,” Mom replies, placing a reassuring hand on Hope’s shoulder. Dad just nods at us and begins walking the room.
Jill kneels in front of Hope. “We’ll be right back, I promise.”
Hope nods but doesn’t look happy about it. I’m already outside of the gift shop by the time Jill catches up with me. When she does, I make my way around to the right side of the ticket counter and see what I was dreading. There are six bodies behind the desk, and they’ve been ravaged to pieces.
“Frank…” Jill says, pointing.
There’s a second trail of blood starting from the bodies, heading back toward where the elevator travels down to the caves is located. This trail, unlike the other ones, is that of an upright being with bloodied footprints, something alive, whereas the first set of crimson streaks came from something being dragged.
And they’re little.
“More gremlins,” I say, keeping my voice down.
As much as I don’t want to look, I have to. I push through the rear double doors and scale a short set of steps up to the outer building that holds the elevator. The footprints lead the way, and when we round the corner, we see that the doors to the elevator are broken and ajar.
As far as the gremlin tracks are concerned, they just keep right on going into the darkness.
Jill draws her gun, and I unsheathe my machete. Side-by-side, we edge forward until we can barely peek out into the empty shaft. Unfortunately, or in this case, fortunately, we can’t see squat. Jill quietly digs into a pocket on the side of her pack and produces a small, yellow, pen-shaped object.
A glowstick.
She snaps the object and vigorously shakes it. Then, she looks at me. I nod. Biting her lip, Jill leans out into the black hole and drops it. Not twenty feet below our perch, we get the first glimpse of a gremlin. She’s clinging to the side of the elevator shaft—and so is another one.
And another.
And another.
“Run,” I whisper, as I see dozens upon dozens of tiny faces turn up our way.
Terrified, Jill doesn’t move, staying locked in place instead.
I grab her arm and yank her back toward the castle. Just as we push back through the rear doors, a chorus of high-pitched shrieks let loose. Jill responds and tugs free of my grip, moving on her own now. We hustle back down the short flight of stairs and burst through the rear doors, back into the atrium.
Hope, Mom, and Dad all rush out from inside the gift shop, unsure of what’s happening.
“Go, go, go!” I shout, terrified by what I saw. “Don’t stop!”
4
“What is it?” Dad yells, struggling down the steps of the castle.
“Oh, my god!” Mom shouts, looking behind us.
Everyone bolts out of the door and, instead of turning down the narrow one-way street that Ruby Falls sits on, we continue forward, straight down the hill on the other side. The front lawn is somewhat steep and rocky, but we make do and successfully traverse it without injury.
Eighty-feet later, we find ourselves in the middle of the Cravens Terrace and Scenic Highway intersection. The Ruby Falls castle is alive with movement, as in, the entire building is swarming with crawling bodies. But that’s where they stay. There are hundreds of Unseen children squirming atop the castle now, each one of them hissing and screeching into the air.
I’m not sure why they aren’t following us, but my guess is that they don't like the daylight and the open space that surrounds us. Like I said before, gremlins tend to not like either.
Not that we’re going to hang around long enough to find out.
“Which way do we go?” Dad yells, looking down the street.
I shove him forward. “Screw the roads. Everyone back into the trees!”
I’m the first one over the guardrail and I quickly turn to help my parents. Jill lifts Hope up and hands her off to me before vaulting the barrier like a gymnast. As she passes me, she gives me a look that says she’s still thinking about what we witnessed in the elevator shaft.
So am I.
That was by far the worst thing I’ve seen thus far. I know it sounds crazy, but it really was the worst. I knew it would be hard to process seeing a gremlin up close, live in person, but seeing so many monsters that used to be kids of Hope’s age…
Some were even younger.
I shake my head and try to clear the memory away. It doesn’t work, but you know what does? Hope squeezing me tight. I know its sappy, but it’s true. I’m a maple tree—full of sap.
God, I’m an emotional wreck.
It’s incredible what the end of the world can do to you. I was emotionally dead just a month ago. Now, I have a hankering to eat a gallon of ice cream while watching a Hallmark Channel movie marathon.
Candace Cameron-Bure Christmas special?
Sure, I’m down.
The grade beyond the guardrail is steep, and our footing is poor. No one stays on their feet for more than a few seconds at a time. Luckily, none of us crack our skulls either. I tumble with the rest of them, sliding to a stop when the earth finally levels out. Standing, I see that we’re fifteen feet beneath road level and another twenty feet to the north, and whatever gear we lost during the grassy slide is quickly collected.
Now, we restart our escape with rockets lit under our asses.
The trees here are even thicker than those from earlier. While the woods around Lookout Mountain have paths to use, these weren’t meant to be hiked through. These are all cluttered with branches and tall grass, the latter coming up to Hope’s chest. After only a few feet, she climbs into my arms and out of the suffocating underbrush.
We move this way for a hundred feet before we’re forced to stop at a cliff. It isn’t that high—about three-stories tall. While not high up in cliff terms, it’s still too high up for us to jump.
Mom and Dad argue with one another about how to get down while Jill and I do the same ourselves. The only one that isn’t speaking is Hope. She’s facing away from the drop, looking back into the trees.
“Shhh!” she hisses, keeping her voice low. “Listen.”
We all quiet down and hear it immediately. At first, it sounds like a thousand sheets of sandpaper doing work on wood. But as the noise rises in volume, I realize that it’s actually getting closer.
The gremlins are giving chase.
/>
“Not good,” I say, turning to my father.
He’s already digging into his backpack. Not a heartbeat later, he pulls out a coiled length of rope—the last one we have. He picked it up a week ago, but we’ve yet to need it.
‘Now’ sounds good.
After he ties off an end to a tree, Hope and I are the first to descend. This time we don't have repelling harnesses to help us out like we had in Art's store back in Florida. We’re going to be doing this completely naked, as in, with no help of any kind.
With Hope clinging to my chest like a frightened koala, I turn and lean my ass out over the cliff. As comfortable with my positioning as I can get, I jump away from the wall and release my grip on the rope just a bit. Hope yelps when we drop, and I do everything I can to keep us from actually doing just that. The ground beneath us is asphalt and nothing else.
Thankfully, the only parts of my hands that are beat up are my knuckles. My palms are okay, and we make short work of the descent. I quickly set Hope down and search our landing zone for anything unfriendly. Thankfully, I don’t find anything. No cars either. U.S. 64 is completely deserted.
“Shit,” I mumble, disappointed.
“Faster!” Dad yells from above, begging Jill to move her ass.
If she had the time, Jill would’ve gladly free-climbed the damn thing and let someone else use the rope instead. Even now, she’s only halfway to me, and my mother is already starting her own descent. This is where it could get really bad, extremely quick. Like I’ve mentioned before, Mom and Dad are in phenomenal shape for their age.
But this is insane!
Jill lands and rolls her ankle, grunting as she hits the ground. She doesn’t stay down for long, though. She hobbles to her feet and draws her gun, just as my father opens fire on our pursuers. Jill does the same from here, taking pot shots at anything that moves in the canopy above—shadows mostly.
After four booms of his shotgun, I see Dad practically leap from the ledge. Small, clawed hands rake at his back in midair, missing him by mere inches. He has the rope wrapped around his waist and is clutching it tightly. A second later his fall is averted, and he is yanked back and thrown hard into the stone facing. With a loud, “oof” he hits the back of his head and let's go, dropping like a bomb from fifteen feet in the air. While not usually a fatal height from which to fall from, it's just as likely to kill him as it is to break his back and legs.
