by Ann Christy
“Don’t fire,” I hiss. “They’ll see where we are.”
Matt either doesn’t care of doesn’t hear me quickly enough, because another shot rings out. I clap my hand up to my ear, but it doesn’t matter. All I hear is ringing. One of the two crouched at the gate falls down like a sack of flour. The limping, cursing one starts hobbling back the way he came.
Only, there’s a problem with that. Their activity has drawn a few of the in-betweeners away from the action at the tents, and they’re moving fast in the direction of the gate. The last crouched man must see them too, because he almost disappears as he lays down on the ground, reducing his profile.
Now it’s Matt’s turn to curse. My ears are still ringing, but he taps me on the shoulder, mouths the words, “Stay here,” and then gets up to run, bent low in the shadows. He’s clearly trying to gain a better position for shooting.
There must be more light than I thought leaking out at the edge of the trees, because a shot rings out and I can tell that it passes in our general direction. Several more follow and I press my head into the dirt and fallen leaves. Any thought I had of going closer flees me, and I prop up my rifle more carefully on my pack and scope in the shooting man as best I can.
I don’t know why Matt hasn’t returned fire. He must be much closer than I am, though I can’t see him. Between the fallen limbs, trees, and undergrowth inside the tree line, I can’t tell what’s what. I can see the gate better than anything that might be ten feet from me.
There’s a light on the little portable guard shack just inside the gate. It lights the area around it, but makes the shadows sharper outside the area it illuminates. And the floods in the center of the camp just add to the confusing streaks of light and dark. Just as I think I have him, I see movement to the left of the clump I’m aiming at. I shift my aim, thinking, I’ve got you.
But I don’t. It’s Melody. She’s crouched between the fence and the guard shack, tucked into the smallest ball she can make of herself. The last time I saw her, she was calmly herding the in-betweeners into the gate and in the midst of their crowd. How she wound up here, I don’t know, but I wonder if she came back this way to join Luke and then got trapped.
A loud and frantic string of curses reaches my ears and I move my scope to see the limping man moving as quickly as he can, three in-betweeners hot on his trail. One of the in-betweeners is swinging someone’s arm like a giant, disgusting pinwheel as he gives chase. Before they’re swallowed by the darkness at the far edges of the enclosure, I can tell he won’t make it. They’re closing on him and he’s bleeding. They’ll smell him, no matter where he runs or how dark it is there.
A squeal—one that is human and high—makes me jerk the scope back toward the shadows by the gate. The gunman must have spotted Melody and realized she wasn’t one of his group, because I see him clearly for a half-second as he drags Melody up by her hair and pulls her to him like a shield. He drops his rifle and pulls out a sidearm, which he presses to the side of her head with enough force that her head bends to the side.
She starts to squeal, but he shifts his grip on her and she stops. I can’t hear what he might be saying to her, but I can imagine. It’s enough to stop her squealing.
“Open the gate or I’ll put her brains all over the ground!” he shouts. I can barely see his head behind hers, but I see enough to know that he’s looking around, probably making sure his noise didn’t attract more in-betweeners.
He shuffles toward the gate, careful to keep Melody in front of him and then bangs on it sharply with the barrel of his gun. “I mean it!” he shouts. “I know you’re out there.”
To the left of me, all along the borders of the trees, I see flashes of light ever so often as our people pick off anyone who makes it to the fence, including any in-betweeners who try to climb. What I don’t hear is Matt. He would have tried something by now, or at least answered. I’m gripped by fear, knowing that means he’s probably down.
What if he’s dead? What if he’s even now rising, a brand new and hungry in-betweener somewhere close to me?
“Emily!” I shout as loudly as I can. I doubt very much that she’ll hear me. I can’t distinguish her from anyone else inside the cluster of running chaos that is the center of the encampment. Part of a tent collapses even as I search for her. Things are not going well for the military group. The gunfire is decreasing and the screams increasing.
The man holding Melody mistakes my yell and shouts, “I’ll shoot her. I’ll shoot Emily!” He emphasizes his words by jerking Melody’s head and slamming the butt of his gun into the side of her face. Even from here, I can hear her pained cry.
“I’m coming! Back up! I’ve got cover, so don’t be stupid!” I call out.
He pauses, perhaps in indecision at my claim of having cover, but the flashes of light in the more distant trees are clearly evidence enough of my claim, because he shuffles backward a couple of steps. That brings him even with the in-betweener still lying there and jerking, though he’s jerking with less vigor now. The nanites are working in him. I hope he jumps up and rips that guy to shreds.
He must think that the in-betweener jumping up is a possibility as well, because the gun lowers from Melody’s head just long enough for him to shoot the in-betweener. I can’t tell from here, but I have no doubt it was a shot to the head.
Melody lets out a wail that sounds more like sorrow than pain to me. Did she know this in-betweener? She must have, since he’s from the same place she lived. She must have known him well.
I rise and leave the cover of the trees, flipping my rifle to my back and trading it for my sidearm once more. I hold it out, ready to fire, as I walk the short distance to the gate. Luke is still lying there in front of the gate, still and quiet.
I look around on the ground for Matt, but I don’t see him until I almost step on him. He grabs my ankle and I let out an eep of surprise. When I drop to my knees next to him, his eyes are wide and round. His other hand is pressed tightly to his side, his chest heaving with effort.
The man at the gate shouts for me to hurry and Matt jerks his head in that direction. I press my hand to the place where his is and feel the hot, slick feeling of blood. A lot of blood.
“Matt!” I whisper harshly.
“Don’t let him know I’m down. He has to think you have backup,” he says with effort.
I look at the place where his wound is, trying to figure out what part of him is shot and how long he can survive without medical care. It’s in his right side, high up, almost under his chest.
“Liver, I’d guess,” he grunts, clearly understanding what my cataloging means.
“Oh no,” I say.
“Just go. I’ll hang on.” He actually smiles at me, though it is a pained one that encompasses all that I might feel if I knew I was about to die.
“I love you like a stupid, older brother, you know,” I whisper and kiss his cheek. I don’t know what made that come out, but once it does, I know it’s the right thing to say.
“And you,” he whispers harshly. “Go! But don’t let him out.”
I return the grim smile he gives me and stand to go. After a few steps, I shift my gun in my hands because they’re slick with blood. I wipe them down the sides of my jeans. The last thing I need is slippery hands right now, but that I’m wiping away the blood that animates someone I love is not lost on me.
Behind me, I hear Matt shout, “I’ll shoot you if you made a single wrong move. Back up!”
How he managed to muster the reserves to give that strong, uninjured sounding shout is beyond me, but tears try to come into my eyes at the words. Even now, he’s protecting me and all of us.
There can be no military survivors to report on what we’ve done. They have to be lost. Simply gone. No intelligence can ever be gained by whoever is running this operation. He’s helping me make sure one of those potential survivors gets his just desserts.
Well, they all have to die except one or two. We need answers. But this guy looks young. A soldier
, not a decision maker. And I can’t capture him like this. So, he isn’t going to survive.
All I have to do is figure out how to kill him.
The man backs up another step or two, jerking Melody with him. I fumble the keys from my pocket and he must hear it because he shouts, “All I want is the gate open. Once I’m gone you can lock it again. I just want to get away.”
He sounds so desperate and so young. But this is one of the group that killed an entire suburb of survivors, peaceable people who had done well at surviving for years. And they left them to rise again as monsters. This young man, whoever he is, is no better than the group that took Gloria.
That thought hardens my resolve and I walk slowly toward the gate, gun raised. I shout as loudly as I can, “Emily!”
Though I can’t really take my eyes off the man with the gun for long, I do glance toward the cluster of running people and lights. Someone inside that chaotic frenzy stops, the light from a fallen floodlight limning the shape of their body in white light like an angel. I don’t have to see that person to know it’s Emily. Whether she finally heard my shouts or simply caught a whiff of the blood and terror over here, I don’t know.
What I do know is that the figure starts running.
Today – Blood is the Thing
At the gate, I fumble with the lock, not putting in the key. The man hisses, “Hurry!”
“I have to find the right key!” I whisper back.
He jams the barrel into Melody’s head again, making her head jerk to the side and a small groan of pain escape her. She keeps looking at the in-betweener near her feet. Tears are running down her face and catching the light from the guard shack.
The figure running toward us is silent and very fast. I see that it’s Emily when she passes under the last of the standing floodlights near the Humvee parking area. She’s hunched and running, her hair no longer in braids and flying around her like a tangled, black curtain, her face nothing more than a pale oval.
Suddenly, Melody freezes, her whimpers stopping so suddenly that it makes me look. The man holding her notices it too, because he jerks her. Instead of resisting the jerk, she simply rolls along with it, like she’s suddenly become made of soft clay, malleable and easily pounded into a new shape. I can’t see her eyes, but her face is smooth and utterly without expression.
Emily. It must be Emily.
Melody starts to sink to the ground and the man shifts his grip, letting go of the hair at the back of her head to grip her around the shoulders, his forearm across the top of her chest. The change in Melody is so sudden and violent that I back away from the fence. Her mouth opens wide and she bites at the inner wrist of the man’s arm.
He screams, the gun firing and sending a round somewhere into the dark. Any normal person would have flinched from the noise so close to their face, but Melody simply bites. Blood spurts up into her face and the man’s fingers jerk, the gun falling to the ground.
At the same time Melody pulls away, strings of tendons, blood vessels, and flesh coming with her, Emily slams into the man’s back and takes all three of them to the ground. Melody begins to scream as she tries to wiggle out from the bottom of the pile, and the man screams too. Emily doesn’t though. She just pulls the man’s head back, stretching his neck, and slams her face into the side of his throat.
His screams rise as she tears at him and I have to keep backing away from the carnage. I don’t want to see her do this, even though the bigger part of me is overjoyed that she is. I don’t want the memory of seeing her revel in tearing a human apart.
Her head darts away and back, over and over. It’s so fast it almost looks unreal, like a film running at high speed. The man is silent after less than thirty seconds, his blood spraying like a bent garden hose around him. I doubt he’s fully dead when Emily jumps off of him and races to the gate. Her face is absolutely covered in blood, as are her arms and legs. She’s a dark, wild wraith and she’s terrifying.
Almost without volition, I hold up the gun toward her as I back away. At the gate she raises her head and sniffs the air, but it’s not a predatory look on her face at all. It’s almost frantic.
She grips the chain link and shakes the gate, a low keening starting in her throat. Melody is finally up, her face as bloody as Emily’s, but those strange doll-like movements over. She crawls to the body of the now-dead in-betweener and hugs it, wailing in sorrow.
Emily shakes the gate again and looks at me, her keening rising in volume.
“I can’t let you out, Emily,” I say, the gun shaking in my hand.
Her fingers tighten around the links and her whole body is taut at the fence, like maybe she can simply will herself through the links. She gets out a single word, “Mad.” She shakes her head violently, then tries again. “Matt.”
Matt. Of course. The smell of his blood, of his death—or soon to be death.
“Naht hurd you,” she says with a low intensity. She stares at me, her gaze pleading, yet fierce.
Not hurt you.
Screw it. If I’m meant to die, then I’ll die.
“Matt, hang on!” I call over my shoulder as I run to the gate. There’s no fumbling for keys since I really only have two of them. As I unwind the chain, Emily backs away toward the dead man on the ground and drags him forward, leaving a dark trail on the ground as she does.
She grunts something and Melody looks up at her and shakes her head. “No!” she wails.
Emily drops the man she’s dragging and marches over to Melody where she’s still hugging the dead in-betweener. She crouches, grips Melody’s face in her two hands and stares at her, little sounds coming out of her mouth that I don’t understand.
Melody wails again, but nods, and Emily lets her go to grab her dead man again. Melody stands, still crying, and grabs both arms of the dead in-betweener. She too starts dragging her corpse toward the gate.
I have no idea how they’re going to use two dead bodies to help Matt, but that’s clearly what Emily has in mind. I pull open the gate enough for them to get through, my heart in my throat as I do. As she passes me, I can see that Emily’s stomach is bulging enough that she almost looks pregnant. I hate it that she’s eaten so much—especially considering what she ate inside the fence—but I’m also relieved because she’ll be more coherent and less likely to attack me.
She doesn’t pause at all and doesn’t ask where Matt is. She can smell him, no doubt. Her and her corpse make an unerring beeline for the spot where he lies in the undergrowth. Melody is having a much harder time dragging her corpse, so I pull the gate closed behind her and take one of the dead man’s arms to help her.
It’s only then that I notice something I should have seen before. Melody has red hair, not the orange kind, but a darker red that’s so beautiful it looks like it should have come from a bottle. The man we’re dragging has that same hair.
“Oh,” I gasp and look at Melody. She’s still crying the hard cries of deep grief. “I’m so sorry.”
She glances up at me and nods, but her tears and gasping cries keep right on going.
Emily reaches Matt first, and when we get there, she points to a spot next to Matt, clearly meaning for us to drag the body there. Matt is still alive, and I drop to my knees next to him, hoping he isn’t afraid because Emily is leaning over him with blood all over her face. He is, clearly, because he’s pushing her away with a hand to her chest.
“Matt, it’s okay. She’s going to help you,” I sooth, pulling his hand away from Emily.
She didn’t do anything to stop him, but once I pull his hand away, she immediately grabs his other hand, the one over his wound, and tugs it away. She leans close to the wound, sniffing with her mouth open and that horrible, strange warbling sound in her throat. Savannah said once that it reminded her of something called the Flehman reaction that some cats do. She said it has something with detecting pheromones or something, but Emily seems to do it for lots of reasons.
After she takes a few deep sniffs over his wou
nd, she sneezes—which cannot be sanitary—and shakes her head like she’s shaking off the scent. She leans over Matt toward the dead in-betweener and makes a motion like she’s stabbing him. Then she looks at me and says, “Oben!”
Open.
Oh, god, please tell me she doesn’t want me to do that.
“Oben!” she commands a little louder and smacks me on the chest. Her fingers brush the big knife at my side as her hand falls away and she gives me a look. It’s a look that says, “There’s your tool, now use it to open the box of gushy candy.”
Melody’s cries dial up a notch when she understands. I gently pull her arms away from the body and say, “I’m so sorry. He’s gone. He won’t feel this.”
She stands and stumbles off toward the gate and I feel absolutely awful. Emily leans over again and jabs her fingers into the breast bone of the corpse then down into the soft spot just beneath, pointing out where I should cut. I take a deep breath and slam the sturdy blade down into the chest. I feel it when the blade tags the lower edge of the bone. I make to wiggle the blade downward, toward the belly, but Emily’s arm shoots out toward the hilt of the knife to stop me.
“Ah,” I say, in shock from what I’ve just done, but understanding that she doesn’t want me to get near the bowels.
She snatches the knife out of the cut and wiggles her fingers into the body, reaching in and upward until her hand disappears up to the wrist. She tugs, then pulls out a mass that must be the heart, though who can really tell in the near-darkness? I feel like I’m in a nightmare, like none of this can be real.
Matt makes a sound of fear. His eyes are wide and glinting in the light as he watches what Emily does. And what she does is put the bloody mass to her mouth, suck at it, and then put her mouth to the hole in Matt’s body. He lets out a groan of pain so intense that I want to beat Emily for causing it. When he tries to lift his head, she pushes his head back down with one bloody hand across his forehead, the mass of meat in her other hand just a foot from me.
The whole area smells of metal and blood. That makes me look around. There are a whole lot of other in-betweeners nearby and this is a heady lure. Of course, they have oceans of it inside the fence and probably don’t need more.
