Devil’s Wake

by Steven Barnes

  “Not to us, maybe.”

  He hopped off the bike. “Yoo-hoo! Trick or treat!”

  The nearest building’s exit doors were chipped, its glass broken like that of so many windows. Still, Terry propped the door open with a large stone so they could get out fast. An escape route. Terry glanced at Darius, who nodded. He’d stay outside as a lookout. Hipshot thrust his nose inside, made a deep growling sound, but took a couple of halting steps.

  “Hello! Anyone here?” Terry stuck his head through the open doorway. For some reason it smelled better inside than outside. “Let’s go.”

  The halls within were cluttered with trash, flyers, and chunks of colored cardboard. Terry picked up one of the flyers, which said: Eyes open!!! The disease transmits through blood and possibly other body fluids!!! If you are bitten or scratched, immediately seek medical assistance!!!

  Piranha leaned the tip of his machete against the wall and read over Terry’s shoulder. “Yeah, as if there was a vaccine. Can you imagine the morons who turned themselves in? ‘Hey, is this where ya’ll go for the vitamins?’ ” His backwoods twang even goosed a snicker out of Kendra. Damn. He’d thought that well had run dry.

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” Terry said.

  Kendra stopped and stared up at a poster of an attractive but severe-looking black woman in gray-white camos saying “Military OneSource is an excellent pool of information for our soldiers and families. Use it—I did!”

  She had no idea what a “Military OneSource” might be, but wondered if it had, on Freak Day, actually turned out to be an excellent source of information for this woman’s family. She sure hoped so.

  Dean was ignoring them, watching Hipshot nosing about the paper-and glass-strewn floor.

  “Wonder what the hell happened here,” Dean said. He flipped his hair out of his eyes with his left hand, keeping his rifle close with the other.

  “That smell again,” Sonia said, wrinkling her nose. “Not close by. But…”

  “Yeah, try that morgue in the parking lot,” Piranha said.

  Sonia shook her head. “Not behind us. Ahead of us.”

  Terry caught the sour odor then. There were definitely more corpses nearby. “Kendra… stay close.”

  Kendra nodded, walking practically hip to hip. She wouldn’t wander off, and she’d sworn she knew how to handle her .38. Time would tell.

  Hipshot led the way, sniffing as he went. The tile beneath their feet was dark brown, the doors lining the halls marked with papers reading HAVE YOU SIGNED UP FOR FOOTBALL? And bonuses still available for overseas duty. And the buddy system: sign together, serve together. It was all so strange. If not for the deserted, trash-strewn halls, this might have been any ordinary day.

  “Hold up.” Piranha raised his hand. Hipshot had stopped, cocking his narrow head sideways. “I heard something.”

  “Close?” Terry said.

  “Not sure.”

  The late afternoon’s sunlight washed through the halls, giving them a wan, faded impression, almost like a watercolor. They walked slowly, pausing while one or another checked each door, and Hippy waited for them, whining softly. They didn’t want any surprises from behind. One of the doors was locked. The rest were offices with overturned chairs and desks, papers in disarray.

  Someone had moved out in one hell of a rush. Together, they climbed a narrow flight of badly painted stairs. At the first landing more patriotic posters were plastered on the wall. One called the Army Reserve “The Essential Provider for Training and Support Operations, Engaged Worldwide with Ready Units and Soldiers.”

  Yeah, well… Army Strong or not, they hadn’t been ready for this.

  Just at the top of the stairs, Sonia stopped, pointed at the tile. “Here,” she said, pointing at the floor. “Blood.”

  Dean shone his Eveready down at an umber smear.

  “More of it over here,” Dean said. He pointed out bullet holes in an erratic pattern across a door with a broken lock. “Bad juju, man.”

  “No one here. Judging by the Porta Potties, the fences, there used to be.”

  As Piranha checked another door, Terry noticed that Kendra stepped back, raised her pistol as if someone had taught her how to use it properly. Good. There was definitely something sexy about a chick who could watch your back.

  Piranha whistled, and then he and Dean crossed the threshold, disappearing into the room. Silence for a couple of seconds, then Dean said, “Empty.”

  They backed out, guns still at the ready, and continued down the hall, checking doors as they went.

  The hall ended in an L-turn, and they headed to the left and through a door. Another office, this one strewn with papers, the walls cluttered with posters, photographs of dozens of fine young men standing in groups, perhaps preparing for deployment to Okinawa, West Germany, Iraq. The black-and-white images were dated back to 1943, color photos beginning in the mid-fifties. World War II? Korea?

  “Antenna,” Piranha said. He pointed the machete at a white-door brick two-bedroom across the way. Beside it stood a hundred-foot red radio tower.

  The white door had been crushed in. Windows broken. Crows rustled in the entrance.

  “This is starting to get just a little depressing,” the big guy said.

  “Stay frosty,” Terry said. He remembered the line from Aliens.

  “Stop,” Dean said. “I think I heard something.”

  It was just a rustling at first, but that faint crackling-leaf sound was followed by something louder, more definite. Footsteps. Slightly heavy and disconnected, as if something about the walker’s balance was a little off. Steady and slow.

  “That’s… not good,” Sonia whispered.

  The office was connected by a simple door to another room farther on, as if a suite of offices was laid out parallel to the hallway. By mutual, silent agreement, none of them wanted to go out in that hall. Hipshot’s floppy ears were plastered back against his head. His eyes burned, but he made no sound, save for his nails clicking against the tile floor. Then, not even that.

  The windows to the inner halls were frosted, only shadows of greater and lesser depth visible to them. At first, the dimming light from the distant outer windows was faint but unbroken. Then, a shape appeared in the glass. Tall, probably male, shuffling forward a halting step at a time. It stopped, perhaps turned. He couldn’t quite tell. If the freak had turned in their direction, it would be looking directly through the frosted glass.

  None of them moved, not even Hipshot. The freak said something. They couldn’t make it out the first time, but then it repeated itself.

  “Coffee, black,” it said. And then again, “Coffee, black.”

  Then it continued its shuffling way down the hall. Terry was just noticing himself exhale when a smaller shadow darkened the glass. Just the top of a head this time. If the rest of the body was to proportion, then that might have been a child. Following its father?

  Two sets of clumsy footsteps, one heavy and one light, continued down the hall, and then were gone.

  Kendra spoke first, softly. “Can we be sure those were what we think they were?”

  “You want to yodel and find out?” Piranha was holding his machete so tight that his knuckles had paled.

  “There’s nothing here,” Dean said. “Let’s get out.”

  “Good idea,” Terry said. “Through the door.”

  They continued through the linked offices, stepping around overturned chairs and desks, on into the next room, where the honey-rot odor of decomposition smacked them in the face.

  Once, not too long before, it had been a woman’s body. Now it was just a mannequin-shaped bag of rotting meat. She had been blond, thin, and wearing a down-filled blue jacket. The white filling was now scattered, torn free, and matted with blood. Bite-size chunks had been wrenched from her cheeks and throat. What had once been her nose was now just a gaping maw in the middle of her face, blue eyes gazing out at them with a dull incuriosity beyond the need for questions and answers.
r />   It had taken more than a few friendly nibbles to reduce a woman to this condition. Parts of her were simply gone, sundered by hands and teeth. Intestines, dried and fly-blown, extruded from a gash in her middle like fat, floppy shoelaces.

  She was pushed up against the wall, as if she had died trying to escape, and her killers hadn’t even bothered dragging her into the middle of the floor before they began to feed.

  “I thought they just took bites,” Kendra said.

  “The fast ones,” Dean said, his voice like wind blowing across a cold, wet hole. “The slow ones seem to have a heartier appetite.”

  Terry kept expecting the dead woman’s eyes to follow them as they left. But no, they remained fixed as they crossed the room and exited. And would remain so until they were eaten or dried and sunk deep into the ravaged skull.

  It took less than a minute to find the rear fire escape, and, climbing down, they found themselves in a grassy acre dotted with thin trees and ringed by low drab buildings. Sonia’s nose wrinkled. No bodies in sight, but…

  “Whatever I was smelling,” she said, “it’s closer.”

  She was right. Terry pinched his nose. His brain urged him to run back the way he’d come. A whining Hipshot now bringing up the rear, they circled the building and picked up Darius, who despite his best efforts to seem blasé was happy to see them.

  “What now?” Darius said. “Still looking for weapons? Place looks stripped.”

  “Over there,” Terry said, and pointed at a pair of beige bungalows. Rectangles on the sides might have been garage doors, except there were no driveways leading to them.

  “Doors still look locked. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  They passed through a gate in the hurricane fencing and crossed the grass walking in a rough circle, scanning in all directions, and Dean was the first to reach the nearest bungalow. Terry had been wrong about the lock: it was broken, and the inside, wide enough to park three limos, was a mess of torn boxes and gnawed wrappers. Nothing useful here.

  But the second building had heavy, reinforced doors, and the locks and chains to match. Dean put his crowbar in and twisted, grunting and straining. When he couldn’t break it, Piranha helped him. But although they groaned until they were breathless, the thumb-thick links held strong.

  Terry paced, watching. The weapons had to be in there. Had to be.

  Piranha broke his attention. “Ah… I think we’re a little far from Blue Beauty. Maybe bring her a little closer?”

  Was thirty yards too far? Well, yeah, if a freak flock descended.

  “Think I should drive the bus around?” Terry said.

  Dean and Piranha scanned the grass, which was broken by the trees and fences. The crowbar dropped with a clang on the concrete lip of the storage bunker, and Piranha leaned against the door to catch his breath.

  “I think that might be the smartest thing you’ve said today.”

  The steering wheel twisted in Terry’s hands as the Blue Beauty hit the fence. The snowplow sheared the lock and chain, and chunks of segmented metal pole went flying. Through the bug-spattered windshield he watched his group cheer. They seemed happy to have something to cheer about.

  “Good girl!” he said, and patted the wheel. “That’s it. Good girl.”

  But his euphoria dimmed when the bus sputtered, threatening to choke, before the engine sounded right again. Terry had heard that sound once before. Maybe it was just a warning: You better treat me right.

  Coaxing quietly, Terry turned the Blue Beauty around and brought it to a stop. Then he stopped, opened the doors, and hopped out, grinning. “World’s biggest lock pick,” he said.

  While Terry inspected the bus for damage, Dean swung his crowbar in a looping arc and approached the nearest bungalow. The double doors of an attached garage or storage unit were locked and chained. “Heavy,” Dean said. “But the weak point will be where they screwed in the latch. I’m puttin’ my money… here.”

  He wedged the crowbar between the latch plate and the wooden door and leaned his weight on the bar. It took three tries before the screws groaned in protest and began shredding the surrounding wood. Another two pulls and the lock and chain disintegrated.

  Piranha entered first, his flashlight splashing around in the darkened chamber. He let out a long, low whistle. “Oh, baby!”

  “Guns?” Terry asked hopefully, scrambling behind him.

  “Nope, but almost as good.”

  The vault was piled with boxes, about half of them labeled MRE. Terry chafed from his disappointment about the guns, but could barely believe his eyes.

  “MRE?” Kendra said. “What’s that?”

  “Meals Rejected by Everybody,” Piranha said. “Actual translation: decent chow. I had a cousin in the service, and he used to get ’em all the time and they last, like, longer than herpes. He was on the Ways and Means Committee: that means he always found a way. Let’s cart ’em to the bus.”

  “Let’s keep our eyes open for the guns first,” Terry said. The storage unit was crammed to the top with boxes, as if it had been packed tight—except for a space good for maybe three boxes on the right aisle. Maybe someone had been shopping.

  “Pipe dream, man,” Piranha said quietly. “Do I really have to say it?”

  Terry’s jaw tightened as if he were trying to crack a walnut with his teeth. “We’re a long way from done here.”

  The aisles between stacks of boxes were just wide enough for a heavy-duty hand truck, a working specimen of which they found leaning against the back wall.

  “Let’s check out the other unit,” Terry said. He grabbed the crowbar, and jogged over.

  The third bungalow was only twenty feet away, but Terry felt exposed, with a strong sense that they were being watched.

  The third storage unit was locked but not chained, and Terry should have known something then. The door was fastened with a compact Abus combination lock. The latch was scratched and bent, as if the lock and latch had been worked quickly and sloppily, many times. Terry set the pry bar, and after a few grunts the Abus clattered to the ground.

  “Damn,” Terry said, plugging his nose as the door opened. “ ’Bout this time I wish I’d skipped breakfast.”

  As the door opened the stench rolled out at them like a wave of acrid smoke. Sonia was the only one who hadn’t jumped back, staring at what she had probably known all along.

  Piranha looked like he was about to throw up but managed to choke it back. He turned sideways, grabbing the door by one hand.

  The air was clotted with flies, the storage unit crammed with human bodies. The ground swarmed with ants and little black beetles. The syrupy decomposition stench clung to their skin and clothes like a living thing. Dozens of rotting corpses, well over a hundred. Just as in the MRE unit, they were stacked with excessive neatness, in rows.

  A second, more careful look caused Terry to adjust his initial impression. True, the first layers, in the back of the storage unit, seemed to have been carefully arranged. But the upper levels and those farther to the front told another story. These were more carelessly stacked, almost discarded. As if the person or persons responsible had begun soberly and carefully and become progressively drunken. Or deranged.

  “But…” Sonia was motionless by the door, body and mind frozen in place. Hipshot took one sniff and backed off. Damned pooch had more sense than any of them.

  “We saw the blood,” Terry said. “And the damage. What did we think?”

  “Same shit,” Dean muttered, and wrapped a kerchief around his face, trying a quick knot behind his head.

  “Same as what?” Terry asked.

  Dean glared at him. “Nothing,” he said. Terry would have bet skin Dean was lying when he said that, but wasn’t sure exactly what he was lying about.

  “Breathe through your mouth,” Darius said. “It’s better.”

  “Right,” Piranha said. “We choose between smelling it and chewing it.”

  Dean slipped on gloves that matched Darius’s and
ventured a few feet into the tomb to drag one of the bodies out into the light. It was a civilian, a blue-skinned, balding man who’d looked like a fiftyish Arby’s manager before someone had ripped out his throat, as well as pieces of arm and a fist-size chunk of belly.

  Kendra looked at her feet, and Terry followed her gaze. They were standing on some kind of sand. Of course! It was the same sort of absorbent material used in auto shops to soak up oil, but this time for blood. Terry noticed trails where bodies had been dragged over the grass, shoved into the darkness before the doors closed.

  “One thing we know,” Terry said. “The freaks didn’t put ’em in here.”

  “Not unless they’re evolving,” Piranha said. If he was joking, he didn’t seem amused.

  The corpse Dean had dragged out was clad in a Portland State University sweatshirt, now tie-dyed with blood.

  In a flash, Terry knew what had happened. The epidemic had ravaged Portland. Survivors and refugees had gathered here, believing they’d found a haven. Kind of like us, Terry thought, swallowing hard.

  Something had gone wrong, and sanctuary had devolved to slaughter. How many shrieking refugees had transformed into freaks? How many corpses were there? This storage area held more than a hundred, easy, and there were dozens of bungalows and houses in the Vancouver Barracks complex, and each might conceal a similar cache. What kind of man had stayed here after the fall, stacking up those bodies so carefully? Someone had to be healthy and strong to do all of this work…

  “Took more than one to do this,” Piranha said, reading Terry’s mind.

  Hipshot was barking, louder and louder now. And in between the sharp canine sounds they heard the first moans.

  NINETEEN

  The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere, and nowhere. Outside. Floating across the grass, between the trees.

  Terry’s mind raced. He hadn’t met freaks who made a lot of sound, but he knew they made familiar noises and even talked, especially the fresh ones. The fast ones. Piranha’s absurd words seized his mind: Unless they’re evolving. But there was no way. They got slower and hungrier and died. Didn’t they? They sure as hell didn’t stack their kill in lockers.