Shifting

by B. V. Larson

  “For her, I think it is too late. She’s passed on. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” he quoted, “and if I’ve ever set eyes upon a witch, that is one sitting inside our very fortress.”

  “We need her to counter the other witch. You haven’t met her yet, she makes Wilton seem harmless.”

  He sighed. “You’ve endangered us all. Evil can’t be used to combat evil, Gannon, it doesn’t work that way. But very well, you’ve stayed my hand for now.”

  That was all I wanted to hear. We went back inside.

  * * *

  This time the world did not fill up with fog. This time, the storm came on like a thousand giants beating furiously on the roof and the pavement. The red flashes were back, but with odd whooshing sounds rather than thunder. It was unnerving, and everyone knew that things would be changed outside after it had passed. We even invented a name for this kind of odd storm.

  “A shiftstorm,” said Vance next to me. “Sounds a lot like shit-storm, doesn’t it?” he chuckled at his own joke and I smiled.

  We looked outside. It was dark now, just after six in the evening, as closely as I could figure in this age without clocks.

  “About this time last year,” I said wistfully, “a hundred kids would have come out in costumes and begun working the doorbells.”

  “Yeah,” sighed Vance. “I miss the little bastards. Even the night they hammered my pickup with eggs. I even miss that.”

  I squinted out into the storm and watched the chain link fence creak and sway in the growing winds. When lightning flashed, the wet links formed a brilliant pattern of squares for a brief moment. The chains that secured the gate clinked and rattled and shook.

  The lightning flashed again, and outside, past the gate, I thought I saw a shape move. Probably, it was just branch, or a bit of debris from a house roof that had been caught up in a gust of wind. Probably.

  “Who has the shotgun?” I asked sharply.

  “I gave it to Nick Hackler. Don’t know if he has a clue how to use it. Everyone is armed now, even Holly has that pig-sticker of hers.”

  “Where’s the Captain?”

  “He went off, would you believe, back to his place to get some more ammo. Crazy bastard.”

  “In this storm?” I shook my head. I didn’t think he was out to get ammo at this late date. I knew him now and understood his thinking. He didn’t want to be trapped in our little cage when things hit the fan. He wanted be outside, flanking the enemy. But telling Vance this would make him think we had been abandoned, so I just said, “I hope he gets back before things get—wild.”

  “Where’s the Preacher?” ask Vance.

  “He’s got Nick and a few others at the back door. You, me and Jimmy are covering this one. The rest are in the command post.”

  Vance chuckled at the lofty term command post. The dentist’s offices were in the center of the three sections of the center, and we had fortified that inner area with blockaded doors and supplies, in case things went bad.

  “You think she’s coming after us tonight, this Hag of yours?”

  In answer to his question I pointed out into the lashing rain. The window had fogged up a bit, and the rain had turned into silver-white streaks, where you could see it at all, catching the light from the lanterns that burned in the center.

  “What?” asked Vance, craning his neck and smearing a hole in the misted-up glass.

  “The gate,” I told him.

  He stared out into the storm for perhaps ten seconds. He could tell something was wrong. Then he realized the gates hung open. “Where are the locks? Where are those chains? I put them on myself.”

  “Look down,” I said quietly.

  “Ah I see them. Hey, they’re moving!” this last he shouted and several nervous sets of eyes came to rest on backs.

  I didn’t shush him. I did not try to hide it from the others. Everyone would have to know soon enough. Something had changed our rusty chains into a writhing lump of chain-shaped snakes that even now were struggling not to drown in the vicious rains. They twisted and slithered free of the last of the chain link diamonds that ensnared their bodies. The sagging, homemade gate they had held tightly together hung open about a foot or so.

  “It could just be the storm, right Gannon?”

  I shook my head, I didn’t think so. Armed silent people moved up behind us and peered out the windows. Carlene took her baby into the back, her kid over one shoulder and a revolver in the other hand.

  I pulled the Hag’s gift from my pocket, the sharpening stone stamped by her hoof, and I began sharpening my saber with long strokes. Orange sparks leapt from the blade and the bluish glow intensified. Vance looked at the stone, my gloved, misshapen hand and the sword. He licked his lips, breathing hard, and for once said nothing.

  Outside, the gates burst open and dark shapes, moving fast and low to the ground, poured through into the parking lot.

  It had begun.

  Thirty-Six

  The air stunk of cordite and still everyone kept firing and still the things kept coming. They were wolves. But they weren’t natural wolves, they came in wide variety of all sizes and they wore collars. I realized they weren’t originally wolves, but had started life as all the town dogs we’d known and played with and hated when they barked too long at night—together all of them charged our walls in a pack. There had to be a hundred of them, wolves the size of schnauzers and rottweilers and collies and random mutts. We shot them as they came and they went down, but sprang up again, yellow teeth snapping and snarling. They stank of rot and evil. Some of them had bones showing through their fur. Their eyes shined in the night and they threw themselves at the windows and chewed at our makeshift door. Why hadn’t we built a proper door? It was plywood for heaven’s sake. It would never hold against a determined assault, even if the Hag didn’t change it into a wriggling sheet of slimy flesh or something equally horrible.

  A small wolf the size of a fox got in and went for my boot. It was some kind of terrier I imagined in a previous life and I kicked it away quickly before a wolf the size of a big guard dog that was in and on me. I went down with the weight of its body and this one was smarter, if such a thing can be said of such an unnatural beast, it went for my throat with broken fangs and torn black lips. Vance put several rounds into it with a pistol like the one he’d given me and it stopped functioning. It was then I noticed that Holly was kneeling over the smaller one, stabbing it with her huge knife over and over, even though it had stopped moving. I didn’t feel bad, these creatures were already dead.

  “More,” Vance panted in my ear as he helped me back to my feet. “More things are coming in through the gate.”

  The next wave was full of scuttling vines and walking rosebushes. The vines moved low to the ground, their dried up flowers and leaves were brown and wilted, but their questing, snaking tendrils were still supple and lashed at us like whips. The rosebushes were worse, their thumb-thick rattling branches being covered in thorns. I made good use of my saber against them, slashing and hacking, but soon my hands and legs were bleeding.

  “Gannon!” I heard a cry from the back, I wasn’t sure who it was, maybe Nick or Nelson. “They’re coming into the basement!”

  “Hold the door if you can, fall back to the dentist’s offices if we lose the door,” I told Vance and the others that were making their stand in the lobby.

  I turned and ran back into the offices. I had to get the doors down into the basements shut and barricaded. They couldn’t be allowed to get into the middle of us. Holly Nelson ran with me. True to her pledge, she was following me everywhere I went.

  Monika and Mrs. Hatchell were already there with the rest of the Nelsons. Mr. Nelson looked scared but had two pistols resting in holsters he’d rigged up by stapling them to the sides of his wheelchair. He had big arms, like many men who are wheelchair bound, and I knew he’d make a good accounting of himself if anything got this far past our defenses.

  I grabbed Monika by the arm. “Get ham
mers and nails.”

  Behind the nurses’ station was the door that went down into the basement from this section. If anything got in down there it could come up the stairs and into the middle of us. I put my shoulder against the door and grabbed hold of the doorknob with my good hand, preventing it from turning.

  “Is anyone down there?” I asked Nelson.

  Nelson shook his head. His face was white. “Holly,” he said, “You stay back in here with me.”

  Holly didn’t say anything to her father. There wasn’t even a look of pain or defiance on her face; it was as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “Mind your daddy, now,” I told her, mostly for Nelson’s sake. I knew she wouldn’t.

  She just stared at me and the door I was holding closed. I knew her only thought was of how to back me up. I thought about cats that I’d met up with that had “gone feral” and turned wild. Her eyes were like that, she wasn’t really a kid anymore, no matter what she looked like. She was thinking at an animal level.

  Then the door I held closed shook with a heavy impact. I did not have any more time for reflection. Three more times it shivered as something threw itself against the other side with everything it had. The hinges creaked, but it held.

  “Monika?” I shouted. “Where’s that hammer?”

  The blows on the door stopped and for a moment there was no sound other than our puffing breath. Nelson had out his pistols and they were trained at the door in case I went down.

  Then we heard a click, and a rattling sound. The lock had been opened. Then something twisted the doorknob in my hand. I grunted and strained to stop it, but the power of it was incredible, unnatural. I pulled out my other hand, my gloved hand, and clamped it onto the doorknob. It was a strain, but I stopped it, and even managed to ease it back a bit.

  Then the door began shivering again as more blows rained down on it. I held on, my whole body shivering with the door and the impacts. Wood splintered and metal bits creaked and groaned. I could not hold it closed for long.

  Monika and Mrs. H. showed up and started nailing strips of wood over the doorway. The hammers rang in my ears and I sweated, gripping the door with the unnatural strength of my shifted hand and leaning all my weight against the bulging wood. I was glad it was an old door, a solid door of the type they didn’t make anymore. It was a thick piece of varnished wood, well-built by craftsmen that were probably all dead now.

  Soon, I felt brave enough to give up my hold on the door and help the women with the nailing.

  “What’s down there?” asked Monika when we stopped, breathing, long enough to survey our work.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s not a wolf. Wolves can’t twist knobs like that.”

  There were screams coming from another part of the center.

  I looked at Nelson. “Can you cover this?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “If it starts to go, call us.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said.

  I ran down the hall and Holly followed me. Nelson didn’t call her back.

  We were losing the lobby, I saw that right away when I got there. One of our two makeshift plywood doors was down and cold air and splatters of thick raindrops came in, staining the carpet.

  The things coming into the door weren’t wolves or plants now, but human shapes, mostly dressed in colorful summer clothes, when they wore anything at all. Jimmy Vanton was there, sitting in a chair with the police shotgun in his hands. His right leg was torn up, but he hardly paid attention to the blood that pumped up out of it. I turned to ask Wilton to stop the bleeding, but she was nowhere in sight.

  After a minute or two, we had fought them off. There was a lull in the attacks and I wondered what the next wave would be like. Vance reloaded with shaking fingers. “We can’t hold everything, there are less than twenty of us left,” he told me.

  “I know.”

  “Let’s pull back out of here and just cover the dentists place.”

  “So much for all that fencing we built out there.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, “we are already retreating to our last stronghold.”

  “Okay, I’ll cover the door, you get Jimmy up and help him into the back.”

  “What about that?” Vance nodded his head toward the lantern on the table. I looked at the lantern, still lying untouched on the kids table with my coat draped over it. There was only the faintest glow coming from under my coat, we had tucked it down as tightly as we could without touching the thing.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “That’s what she is after. Maybe she’ll just take it and go.”

  “Or maybe she will use it to finish us off,” said Jimmy Vanton, talking for the first time. We looked at him. He had both hands on his legs and the bleeding had slowed. “Look, I know no one wants to touch it. I’ll carry it, and you guys get me up and help me walk.”

  “I’ll carry it,” said Holly quietly. She was staring at the thing on the table. I realized she was probably right, she could do it and leave the rest of us to fight and help Jimmy.

  There was a new round of gunfire from the back of the center. It was terrible to listen to, not knowing if everyone back there was dying or just firing out a window at something they thought they saw. I wanted to get all of us together. I wanted to have Monika in my sight at all times.

  Then, outside, we heard the fence go down with a wild rattling, snapping sound. There was crashing in the parking lot. Vance and I exchanged glances. We had heard these types of sounds before. Something big was coming.

  Jimmy struggled up. “I can carry it! I can do more than a little girl, anyway.”

  Vance put an arm out and kept him from toppling over. He clutched his shotgun with one hand and the table with the other.

  The whole building shook then. The huge something that was dragging the fence with it had impacted with the building and a section of the wall in the optometrists section caved in. Then the roof buckled over our heads and a hole opened up. There were screams in my ears, and a huge hand reached down through the hole in the ceiling and lifted up a section of it. Acoustical tiles fell in chunks and roofing pelted us. We all just froze and cringed, ducking down, not knowing for a second what to do. Then Vance and Jimmy fired at the hand as it came back down, covered in black twisted bark. One finger splintered and broke off, and then the tree hand came for Jimmy. He tried to duck, to hobble away, but he couldn’t move fast enough. The hand lifted him up and pulled him, screaming, up into the night sky. He flopped and writhed and grabbed onto the sides of the hole. His shotgun boomed once, and then it was over. Blood and bits of roofing rained down when the hand wrenched him, still gripping his shotgun, through the too small opening.

  More shapes were humping in through the front door and the building shivered under more impacts. I could see in an instant there was more than one tree out there, I envisioned them smashing away at the building.

  We ran then, we simply forgot about the lantern and our job of holding the doorway and we even forgot about Jimmy Vanton, who was as good as dead anyway. We just ran down the halls, Vance and Holly and I.

  Chunks of the building were being torn away now, the trees were wading into the lobby like giants. Snake-like roots lashed the old chairs and smashed through the aquarium. Dried-up fish and colored gravel splattered the floor.

  Behind us, most terrible of all, scintillating light burst in a myriad of colors. Someone or something had uncovered the lantern.

  “What’s happening?” Mrs. Hatchell had my shirt in her hands and she had tears in her eyes.

  My left hand reached up and snatched her hands away. A look of shock and pain came into her face. My warped hand must have squeezed her too hard.

  “You’re crushing my wrists,” she said.

  “Gannon, stop,” said Monika, touching my arm. I twitched away from her touch, but then allowed it.

  “Jimmy Vanton is dead,” I told them. “And we’ve lost the lobby and the lantern.”

&nbs
p; “The Hag has it,” said Vance.

  “Maybe she’ll go away now,” said Nelson hopefully.

  “Or she’ll make more things to finish us,” returned Vance.

  Mrs. Hatchell rubbed her wrists and glared at me. “What about the trees?”

  “Let’s get the buckets and gasoline set up again,” suggested Vance.

  “We’ll burn ourselves up,” said Holly, and everyone paused, realizing she was probably right. The trees were not out in a parking lot now, but digging right into the building. If we threw gasoline on these walls and set them ablaze, we might kill a tree, but we had no way out ourselves.

  We decided to barricade the hallways as best we could with furniture and equipment. I threw computers and monitors and expensive medical lab equipment in a heap on the floor and piled it up. I would have traded it all for a stack of sandbags now.

  The Preacher soon joined us from the backdoor. They had lost that entrance as well. We had retreated to our inner stronghold and there was no way out now. I recalled something I’d read about recordings of the crews in black boxes on lost aircraft, that crews going down in aircraft never seemed to completely understand they were dying, never really believed it, not until the very last second. Unlike in movies, they didn’t weep and scream incoherently, but instead fought the situation, battled professionally until the end with whatever they had, trying everything. And always, they had hope, even though they were doomed. Perhaps denial was one of our most useful survival traits. We weren’t as good as dead, we didn’t accept our doom, the thought never even occurred to us. We simply worked hard to solve the problems at hand.

  “She’s got what she came for, but she’s still coming,” hissed Mrs. Hatchell to no one in particular. “Why?”

  No one answered her.

  After another minute or so of scrambled activity, the roof caved in. At least, that’s what I thought at first. What really happened was the floor collapsed under the fantastic weight of the living trees, taking down the walls and a good part of the roof with it. Suddenly, our corridor that had been ten feet wide or so was half that, or less. The building parted with a vast groaning, tearing noise. It sounded like a freight train roaring by inches away from your head. We dove away from it, but not everyone went in the right direction. Carlene Mitts was standing against the wrong wall at the wrong time. She vanished down into the basement along with twenty tons of brick, furniture, roofing and thrashing trees. It was only chance, I suppose, that she had handed her baby over to Monika before it happened. Or maybe, somehow, she had known. Maybe some changed, newly sensitive part of her mind had told her to do it. We’ll never know the truth, but the baby girl lived.