by Thomas North
He picked up his flashlight from beside him and walked across the hall and into the bathroom, where he opened one section of the blinds with his fingers and looked through the hole. The rain was still coming down hard outside, and it was just barely starting to get lighter, though still not light enough to see much.
"I can't see anything," he said.
"Like I said, I could still hear them downstairs," Kate replied. "They're still around here, they're just not by the door."
Jack shrugged.
"Come on," he said.
They went back into the hall, and he set his flashlight on the chair, so the light was shining on the dresser.
"Let's move this out of the way," he said. He pulled out one of the drawers, still filled with clothes, and set it on the floor. Kate joined him, and when they had all of the drawers out, they both picked up the now much lighter furniture and slid it down the hall, out of the way of the door.
With that finished, Jack went back into the bedroom he had been sleeping in and came out with the baseball bat that Phil had given him two days earlier.
“We’ll keep this pretty simple,” Jack said. “I’ll open the door. We'll see what's out there. If it's clear, we go downstairs. Carefully. If they're still down there, we have to be real careful."
"What if we open the door and they're still there?" Kate asked. "What if they start coming up the stairs? Do we just shut the door again?"
Jack shook his head.
"They’ll be bottlenecked here, so you shouldn’t have to deal with more than a couple at a time. I’ll help cover any of them you can’t handle.”
Kate thought about what that meant. More shooting. More killing. More blood on her hands. She felt a flash of anger rise through her. Of course it was easy for Jack to suddenly play the tough guy, to tell her to "deal with" them. He hadn't killed anyone. She had. More than one, now. And he was telling her to do it again, like they were playing a video game, and the people he was expecting her to shoot were just pixels on a screen.
The thought of a cure still went through her mind. She could imagine shooting their way out of the house, then finding the the police or National Guard on the lawn with a bunch of happy pills that would turn the monsters downstairs back into regular people.
That's some great medicine, doc. I don't suppose you have a cure for a bullet in the head, do you?
Jack held the bat up. “The revolver has six shots. I'll keep the bat just in case I run out of bullets. I’ll only take a shot if there are too many for you to handle. If I go through all six bullets, I’ll take them down with this.”
Kate nodded. “Okay, I guess.”
“Plus,” he added, “I’m actually pretty good at baseball.”
He smiled, and Kate smiled back.
“I don’t want to jinx it,” Jack said, “But this shouldn’t be an issue, up here. It sure sounds like a lot of them have gone. I'm just trying to plan ahead if something were to happen.”
"I don't know, Jack. It sounded like a lot of them were still downstairs. I don't think they've gone that far."
Jack put a hand on her shoulder. "It's fine Kate. I'm just as scared as you. But this is like peeling off a Band-Aid. If we don't do it now, we'll never get the courage to do it, and in a few days, when we're starving, we'll look out and realize that those people left days ago, and that we were stuck in here for nothing. We've got to do this. Like, now."
"I don't know..." Kate continued.
"Come on," Jack said. "You stand way back there." He pointed down the hall, to the end.
Kate sighed, and nodded. "Fine."
She positioned herself down the hall, her back against the wall at the end. Jack stood by the door and grasped the doorknob. He looked back at Kate, who was holding the Glock with both hands in a low-ready position. The extra magazine was sticking out of her pocket.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready.”
Jack slowly turned the doorknob, and threw the door open.
He flattened against the wall, and was about to take a peek around the doorway when a gunshot blasted through the house, shaking the walls and making his ears ring. A second later, a person staggered into the hallway, blood pouring from his chest. Kate fired again, this shot hitting the man in the head.
To their shock, people poured from the stairwell into the hallway. Kate fired rapidly, the first couple of bullets striking a man in the chest. Jack retreated into the bedroom, realizing, with horror, that he had been wrong. Those people had left the staircase, but they hadn't gone far. They'd been downstairs ˗ exactly as Kate had told him. Once they started moving the dresser, making noise, he figured, they'd started coming back. They must have just been climbing up the stairs when he opened the door.
And now they were coming for him and Kate. All of them.
"WE CAN’T JUST keep going back and forth all day," Sarah said. "We˗"
"Wait," Brent said. This time, he did bring the truck to a stop, just in front of the driveway. "You hear that?"
Sarah and Mary listened.
"Not really," Sarah said. "I hear the stupid rain and the wind."
"I hear it!" said Mary. "There!"
In the distance was a faint crack, like a tree branch splitting or a distant thunder clap.
"I do hear it now," Sarah said. "It sounds like..."
"It's gunfire!" Brent yelled. "Shit, don't tell me those two kiddies have guns up there."
He spun the wheel and took the SUV up the winding driveway. The noise became louder and more definite as they got closer to the house.
"I wonder what's going on," Sarah said. "I hope they're not in trouble."
"I don't know many people who shoot guns inside their house when things are going well," Brent replied.
"It's not their house," Sarah said.
"You know what I mean," Brent replied. When he approached the top of the driveway, he turned the SUV around so it was facing down the hill, nearly getting it stuck in the mud in the process.
"Give me the shotgun," Brent said. "You two stay here. I'm going to go see what's going on. Give your friends some help if it looks like it's worth it."
Sarah glared at him. "Like it's worth it?"
He ignored her question, reaching into the back seat where Mary was handing him the Remington pump-action, handling it as if she was holding a piece of expensive China.
"I've got both guns," he said, pointing to his pistol and holster ˗ his brother's, an hour earlier ˗ around his waist. "Would leave you one, but the shotgun only holds five rounds. Might need the bigger magazine on the pistol."
"Whatever," Sarah replied. "I don't know anything about that. But I'm not staying here in this stupid truck while you go and play hero."
"You're not coming with me," Brent said. "You said it yourself, you don't know anything about this shit."
"No, but I know my friends," Sarah said. "Now are we going to keep arguing about this or are we going to go get them?"
Brent muttered under his breath and opened the door.
"You don't want to come, do you?" Sarah asked, looking over the seat at Mary.
"No, I'm fine," Mary said.
"You should probably leave the car running," Sarah said. "And get in the driver's seat. Just in case."
Mary nodded. "That's fine."
Sarah got out of the SUV, the cold rain immediately soaking through her clothes, and hurried to catch up with Brent.
"Here," Brent said when she ran up beside him. He handed her the pistol. "Let me guess: you have no fucking idea how to use this."
"I've never used one before, but how hard can it be, Brent? You point it at something and you pull the trigger, right?"
"Harder than it looks," Brent replied. "That's why cops and soldiers have to train and qualify on the things. At close range it's pretty easy, but don't think you're going to be playing Die Hard on those people from fifty feet away. Try it, and you'll see how easy it is."
"Maybe I will," Sarah replied.
Brent looked at her. "Yeah, don't. You'll probably shoot yourself."
"More likely you," Sarah replied.
Brent laughed. "The fucked up thing is that I believe you."
Sarah smiled.
"Look ahead," Brent said.
They stopped at the end of the driveway. The sky was just beginning to lighten, though the clouds and rain kept a gloomy pall over everything. Through the dimness of the early morning twilight, they could see dark shapes moving around the house, on the deck, and around the vehicle in the driveway.
There were more gunshots, this time clearly originating from inside the house, accompanied by flashes of light in the second story window.
"What now?" Sarah asked. "Do we run in there guns blazing?"
"I have no fucking idea," Brent replied.
A FAT NAKED man lunged in from the hallway, two red holes in his chest from two of Kate's shots. Jack backpedalled, only to run into the bed and fall backwards onto the mattress. The naked man loomed over him and leaned in for the kill. Without thinking, Jack grabbed the gun from his jeans, stuck the .38 onto the man’s temple and pulled the trigger. Chunks of brain flew out the other side of the man’s head, and the heavy corpse fell forward onto him. Jack screamed and struggled under the dead weight before finally pushing the body off him. He looked at the corpse on the floor, its head in pieces, and felt his heart race, like he was about to go into shock.
He'd killed someone.
In the last two days he'd seen enough killing ˗ something that until then, had been practically a fiction ˗ a thing that happened on television and in the movies, maybe on the news to other people he didn't know. But not in real life.
Then everything had happened, and he'd watched Kate kill... he didn't know how many people. Four. Five. Maybe half a dozen.
And now he'd done it, too. Taken a life.
His hands, still clutching the pistol, were shaking. His whole body was shaking. He hadn't thought about what he would feel if he had to kill someone. He hadn't wanted to think about it. But if he had considered it, he would have thought that he would feel guilt. Maybe disgust.
But he felt neither. He felt... terrified. The man, who had probably been coming to kill him, was dead. He had defended himself. The threat ˗ that one anyway ˗ was gone. Yet he felt terrified. More terrified than when the man had been coming at him.
Gunshots came rapidly from the hall. Before he could get up, another person staggered into the room and was on him. Jack kicked her hard with his right leg, sending her stumbling backwards a couple of feet. With the extra time, Jack rolled to the side and off of the bed. He was surprised when he landed on something hard and lumpy. He looked down and saw that he was lying on Phil’s dead body.
He got up in time to watch the new person tumble clumsily over the bed. Jack grabbed her by the hair and flipped her onto her stomach. He jammed the pistol into the back of her head, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. The house was alive with noise, the raspy moans filling the void in between the deafening gunshots. Kate was still firing steadily, the pace of gunshots as fast as it had been when Jack first opened the door.
Looking into the hall at the line of people, Jack saw that not only had he been wrong about them leaving, he had miscalculated their numbers badly. There were far more of them than he had guessed.
Another stepped into the doorway, a short man with a cue-ball head and a pointy nose. Jack tucked the pistol back into his jeans and gripped the bat with both hands. He stepped over Phil’s body, still keeping the bed between himself and the man, and crouched in a modified batting stance. Imagining the top of the man’s head as a large, shiny baseball, Jack stepped, cocked his bat, and swung fluidly, the sweet spot on the bat connecting perfectly with the man’s forehead, the metal-on-bone sound mercifully drowned out by an almost simultaneous gunshot from the hallway. The blow sent the man sprawling backwards into the wall, the front of his skull caved in.
Jack played skull baseball with five more people, cracking their heads when they took their second step into the room. He was still in his batting stance, waiting for another to come in, when everything went quiet. The shooting had stopped.
17
HE MOVED TOWARDS the door, stepping over corpses, stopping just inside the doorway. He could still hear people in the stairwell and on the floor below, but Kate’s gun was silent. Jack peeked around the corner of the doorway, his heart racing in his chest, fearful of what he might see.
A second later, he dropped to the ground, crying out as a bullet slammed into the doorframe, sending splinters of wood flying at him.
“Kate, it’s me!” he screamed.
“Oh my God!” Kate yelled in surprise.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Jack said, slowly pushing himself off the ground. “I’m coming out. Don’t shoot.”
He tried to kick a body away with his feet, but the dead weight was too heavy, so he gave up and just stepped over the corpse. Kate was standing at the end of the hallway, her back to the wall. Bodies lay from the edge of the stairs to halfway down the hall, several having fallen over each other.
“Jesus,” he said, almost whispering. He counted fourteen corpses in the hall. It had been a massacre.
Jack looked at her, his face grim. “Nice shooting."
“There’s more,” she said. “When they fell by the stairs, the rest of them kept tripping over the dead ones. So a lot of them fell down the stairs, I think.”
“I guess that’s why they aren’t still coming up, huh? They can’t get up the stairs?”
Kate shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Damn,” Jack swore.
Using the bodies like stepping stones, he walked to the door and looked down the staircase. Six more bodies were on the stairs. Two still-living people were repeatedly tripping over the still bodies of their brethren, and over each other, making a clumsy attempt to climb the staircase. A few more stood at the bottom of the stairs, growling, looking angry that their prey was beyond their reach. Their growls grew louder when they noticed Jack.
“Are there a lot left?” Kate asked. She navigated the sea of corpses and joined him at the top of the stairs.
“A good amount. Can you shoot them from here?”
“I think so," Kate replied. "But I don't have that many bullets left."
Jack stepped back, almost tripping over one of the bodies.
Kate aimed and fired, and one of the people at the base of the stairs fell to the ground. There was a second gunshot, and Jack jumped, startled. This one had come from outside. They exchanged glances. Kate fired again, hitting another person who had wandered near the staircase, though missing the head. She took him out with a second shot, and he fell on top of the one she'd shot before him.
There was another gunshot, this one vibrating the walls. The head of the last person at the bottom of the stairs exploded in a spray of blood and slime.
"Kate? Jack?"
The voice came from downstairs, and they recognized it immediately: it was Sarah.
"We're up here!" Jack yelled in response.
Someone popped from around the corner into the staircase, and Kate jerked the pistol up again, ready to fire. A second later, she lowered it, a broad smile coming across both her and Jack's faces.
"Sarah!" they both yelled. Their friend was soaking wet, her blond hair hanging down over her shoulders, her clothes ˗ the same she’d been wearing for two days ˗ darkened and waterlogged. She smiled and climbed the stairs, stepping on and over the corpses. She looked around, shocked at the body count.
"God," she said. "I can't believe... I mean you guys held out against this many people."
"I... we had to kill them, Sarah," Kate said. "We opened the door because we thought they were gone, but˗"
"You don't have to explain," Sarah cut in.
"I know," Jack said. "But..."
"All those people," Kate said, shaking her head. "It's just hard to believe. It's hard to believe we killed so many..."
"Can't k
ill someone if they're already dead." The voice came from the bottom of the staircase.
"Jack and Kate, this is Brent Williamson. He was in the police station with us. He helped us get out."
Jack nodded. "Thanks," he said. "What the hell do you mean about already being dead?"
"Just a little theory ˗ well, it's more than a theory really," Brent began.
"We can go into all this later," Sarah said, though Jack was still intrigued, and was looking at Brent intently. "We just need to get out of here. Mary is waiting for us."
"Mary?" Kate asked. "What about Kyle?"
Brent's face remained stoic, but Sarah's face told them all they needed to know.
"Andy?" Jack asked, though he was afraid to hear the answer. He looked at Sarah, and knew he didn't have to hear that one either.
"Jeez," Jack said, the single word all he could muster. They stood in silence for several seconds, Jack and Kate still absorbing what they'd just been told, feeling like they'd just been punched in the gut. Their friends. Dead. Two days ago they'd left the Strive retreat, piled into a van, laughing, joking, making fun, getting ready for a few-hours drive back to a college life of classes and studying and parties and drinking and dates.
Now two of their friends were dead. Even if things did return back to how they were, even if Jack, Mary, Sarah and Kate got the chance to go back to school, Kyle and Andy were gone forever. No second chances. No take-backs. No mulligans. They were gone. Just gone.
"Hey guys, I hate to be the one who breaks the pow-wow here, but we should get back to the truck. You do have another friend who hopefully is still alive, that you can meet," Brent said.
Sarah turned around and glared at him. Together, they went down the stairs.
"Asshole," Sarah said to Brent as she passed him. He gave her a "who, me?" look and then followed behind Kate.
There were a couple more people wandering around in the yard ˗ what had been Phil's yard ˗ but they were ignored. Mary was in the driver's seat of the SUV just as she had been when Sarah and Brent had left her there. She climbed into the back again where Jack and Kate joined. Sarah and Brent took the two front seats again, with Brent driving.
