Bob plucked me from the floor as if I weighed nothing. There wasn’t much in the room to defend myself with, but I sure as hell gave it a try.
I grabbed the alarm clock off the nightstand and smashed it against the side of his head. It didn’t shatter on the initial impact, but it did when it hit the floor. The noise it made was like a small explosion in the stillness of the house.
I stood there a moment and waited for Bob to lose his balance, start wobbling and fall over, unconscious, but he somehow stayed upright. I had no idea how. I mean, I hit him hard enough to crack his skull, and it hadn’t even fazed him.
He smiled his terrible grin as I stared at him with wide eyes.
“I wouldn’t try that again if I were you, Grady.”
The chill in his voice had my imagination filling in the blanks of what he hadn’t said. That was when I waved the white flag. Threw in the towel. I had no weapon, no plan, and no idea of what was in store next. I was, at the time, defeated.
“Walk,” Bob growled. “Only turn when I tell you to turn. Only stop when I tell you to stop. Got it?”
I ambled forward, Bob right behind me, pressing the point of his blade in the middle of my back. Right on one of the knobs of my spine. I knew it hurt, it had to, but I either blocked out the pain or was too scared and flustered to realize it.
Through the house we went. The curtains were drawn on all the windows. As I passed the front door and the legions of clocks tick-ticking on the wall, a great gust of wind rattled the hinges. Instead of dying down, it seemed to pick up in intensity. A bad omen. It sounded as if another blizzard was burying the world.
Same shit, different day, right?
No lights burned in the house except for the dying embers in the fireplace. Those embers weren’t enough to guide my way. I kept looking for something I could use against Bob, something better than an alarm clock. No luck.
I came to the conclusion that Bob could somehow see in the dark. He had to. I stumbled over a hall runner, clipped my hip on an end table, and even rammed a shoulder into the door jamb, but Bob moved with the silence and stealth of a tiger stalking its prey.
This led me to another conclusion: Bob wasn’t completely human. Hell, maybe he wasn’t human at all.
He knows his way around the place because it’s his, that’s all, that (very quiet) optimistic voice said.
But I knew this wasn’t Bob’s house. He lied. Nearly every word that escaped his lips since I first met him was false.
I went down the steps to the basement. They were made of wood and beyond rickety. I thought they were just resting on the staircase’s frame with no screws or nails hammered in to secure them. There was no railing either. My hands hovered to the sides, hoping to feel one, but all I felt was the cold stone wall. So I went down carefully. Bob didn’t take kindly to this. He kept jabbing me in the back with the blade. I was wearing only a few layers. My coat was somewhere in the guest room I’d been sound asleep in, so the blade cut through the cotton and wool with ease. It was a sharp knife. I imagined Bob hunched over a whetstone, sharpening it with that dead look in his eyes, the one I’d woken up to, drooling at the idea of making us bleed.
“Move faster,” he growled.
The deeper I went, the icier the air got. It was as if I wasn’t entering a basement, but heading out the front door and into the blizzard. On cue, the wind howled and the house creaked like it was about to be sucked up into a funnel and transported to the magical Land of Oz.
I would’ve taken that over the events that were soon to follow; I would’ve taken that in a heartbeat.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark, but not enough to make out Ell’s face. I only saw the vague human shapes of four people against the far wall. No Chewy. Something told me he was dead. Bob had no interest in the dog.
I buried the painful thought and focused on the others before me.
I may not have been able to see Ell, but I knew her voice.
“Grady!” she called, and I took off toward her.
Before my second step, Bob’s freezing hand gripped the back of my neck and stopped me in my tracks. He lifted me off the floor a few inches. I did one of those cartoonish legs kicks as he held me up. I thought of Wile E. Coyote after he ran off a cliff, how it seemed like he was running on solid ground until he looked down and saw nothing but thin air beneath him. Then he’d hold up a sign with HELP written on it, and the next thing he knew, he was falling a thousand feet.
I didn’t fall a thousand feet, but when Bob threw me across the room, I imagine my landing gave Wile E. Coyote’s a run for its money, cartoon or not. I landed on the concrete floor and rolled, knocking elbows, knees, and my face until I came to a shuddering stop against the wall.
“Grady?” Ell gasped. “Are you okay?”
I managed to get into a semi-seated position. “Me? Are you okay?”
I reached out to my left and grabbed Eleanor’s trembling hand. I gave it a squeeze, but she didn’t squeeze back. I wasn’t sure she could, because something plastic was cinched tightly around her wrists.
“Enough!” Bob shouted. I couldn’t see him, but he sounded like he was everywhere. Whispering in my ear, in front of me, behind us in the walls.
I imagined him raising his knife, and the knife climbing higher and higher, preparing to come down on the base of my neck.
He threw something, and it bounced in front of me.
“Put these on, Grade. And if you say no, I’ll cut off Eleanor’s ear and make you fuckin’ eat it.”
I patted the floor blindly until my fingers touched the same plastic I’d felt on Ell’s wrists. A zip tie.
“Why are you doing this?” Stone spat. “Answer me!” His voice came out slurry and strained; and it sounded as if his mouth was full of a thick liquid. Blood, probably. “What the fuck is wrong with you, man?” He was on my immediate right, in the corner.
“Because he’s infected with whatever disease those things have,” Mia answered from the wall running perpendicularly from Stone’s corner. She sounded oddly calm. I have no idea how, but I respected the hell out of her for it. She was tough, tougher than me.
“And I know for a fact that the infected can be killed,” she continued. “A bullet can do it. So can a knife, like that one you held against my belly when you woke me up, you piece of shit.”
“Because you killed your little boyfriend? Is that how you know, my dear?” Bob replied. I couldn’t see him, but I heard the smile in his voice.
The image of Billy’s bloody and snow-covered body went off like a flash in my head.
Bob had meant to shock Mia with this reveal, yet she managed to keep her cool.
“Yeah, you’re right, asshole. I know because I killed my little boyfriend. One of the monsters touched him, and he went crazy. He tried to strangle me in my sleep, and he shouted about giving my baby over to the dark, whatever the fuck that meant. I wasn’t having that shit. Mess with me, that’s fine, but you don’t get to mess with my daughter. So I put a bullet in his gut and left him to die in the snow.” Her voice wavered slightly toward the end of the last sentence, but she stopped before losing control.
Bob didn’t respond immediately. I like to imagine he was frightened by her words—or at least a little shaken by them, not getting the reaction he had intended. Though I doubted anything could shake him with the way he was now.
Through with Mia, he directed his next words to me.
“I’m gonna tie you up now, Grady.” A chuckle. “You try anything, your girlfriend’s gonna join the One Ear Club.”
“Fuck you,” Eleanor whispered.
“Ell—” I began, but Bob moved, his footsteps thunderous, and I thought he was going over to her to keep his word, but he stopped in front of me instead.
“Put your hands together,” he demanded “Now.”
“Listen to him,” Mikey said, voice shaking. He was the farthest from my spot, next to Mia. “He’s crazy. Just listen to him.”
I didn’t see what ot
her option I had. Bob knelt before me. The smell wafting off him was cold and slightly rotten. It was the same smell I’d noticed upon first walking into this house. I could stomach it then, but it was stronger down here, strong enough to make me gag.
I clamped my hands together and felt his icy fingers and the hard plastic against my flesh as he wound the zip tie over my wrists and around a low pipe running along the base of the wall. It put me in a wildly uncomfortable position, and he pulled them so tight, my skin burned, possibly split.
He was close enough to take a shot at him, maybe get his knife, which I imagined he put in one of his pockets. I should’ve fought. I should’ve tried. At least then, maybe it would’ve been me who died instead.
But I didn’t.
“I know it’s a little uncomfortable,” Bob said, footsteps retreating, “but it’s necessary. Can’t have you running off now, can I?”
“Where the hell would we run off to?” Stone said. “If we could move our hands from the wall, we couldn’t even see them if they were in front of our face.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I forgot what it’s like to have to depend on the lights,” Bob said, giggling. Now, they don’t like it, any dummy could figure that out, but I don’t mind it nearly as much. Besides, I’ll need a bit if we’re going to get down to business.”
He struck a lighter, and a spark illuminated the darkness for a brief moment. I swear I could feel the warmth despite being twenty feet away. It was glorious.
The small flame flickered as he moved it toward an orange candle in his other hand, and another second or two later the basement was bathed in light.
Eleanor suddenly screamed; Stone mumbled some expletive I was too distracted to understand; Mia sucked in a large breath and then gagged a real gag, no theatrics here; and Mikey made a sound like a dry sob.
Me, I didn’t do much of anything, couldn’t do much of anything.
See, in this near complete darkness, a candle went a long way, and this little light illuminated what was stacked in the far left corner of the room.
Bodies…lots of them.
7
Numb
Earlier, we had wondered what happened to the citizens of Woodhaven, Ohio, and Bob told us the snow and the wraiths had gotten them.
But the snow and the wraiths hadn’t gotten all of them, apparently.
No, Bob seemed to be responsible for a large portion of those disappearances. I can’t say how many. I didn’t count the bodies because I didn’t want to keep looking at them. It was the one time in this apocalypse I almost begged for the darkness. Still, even though I didn’t want to look, I did. I stared at them for a long time.
They were stiff and blueish-gray, the color I’d always imagined zombies would be. I saw men and women with gashes running along their throats; I saw others with their stomachs sliced open, guts hanging out of them and covered in frost like long-forgotten pieces of meat in a freezer; I saw young children, one clutching a teddy bear with a missing button eye (Was this one of the twins?), and teenagers dressed in t-shirts and shorts, normal July attire; I saw a man with an arm missing at the elbow, a ball chain and service tags dangling from around his neck—the soldier who Bob said he met last and who’d gone on his way to a City of Light (another lie). Although the cold had slowed their decomposition, their flesh was tight and wrinkled around their bones like shrink wrap, as if someone had used a vacuum to draw out all their blood and organs. They looked drained. How? I don’t know; all I do know is that something got to them, devoured them, and left behind what was left like trash.
And we were possibly next.
In a few days or weeks, or however long it took for Bob to find his next victims, he would charm others with promises of warmth, food, and shelter, and then they’d wake up to him holding a knife at their throat. Soon after, they’d be forced down into the basement. There, when the candle was lit, they’d see our bodies at the top of the pile, or maybe as the start of a new pile, cast away and forgotten.
“Yeah, I know,” Bob said. “I’ve been messy.” He walked over to the corner and kicked a woman probably not much older than Ell. Jostled, the soldier with one arm slid off, and when the corpse hit the basement floor, it made a sound like a hammer hitting solid glass without shattering. The eyes were wide open. I wondered what the last thing the man saw was. Bob holding a knife, his sickening liar’s grin stretching from ear to ear; or was it the wraiths, all around him as they devoured his fear, his grief, his life?
I turned away, tried focusing on the old furnace to the left, then on the shower with the ripped and moldy curtain beyond the bodies. In my haste to focus on something—anything—other than the dead, I saw a snow shovel leaning up against the nearby wall. It was made of a weighty steel. Some sort of crusty red and gray substance had congealed on the edge of the shovel head. I remembered how Bob told us about Ruth, his neighbor. How she attacked him and cut his arm. He joked about bashing her head in with a shovel, that shovel, but it was no joke, and there was no doubt in my mind what that crusty stuff was. Dried blood, brain matter, and bits of Ruth’s shattered skull.
“You’re disgusting,” Eleanor said. “What is wrong with you? We were nothing but friendly to you, Bob! We don’t deserve this!”
Bob waved a hand and batted his eyelids. “Oh, you flatter me.”
Eleanor jerked forward. The pipe we were tied to shrieked nearly as loud as the wind was shrieking outside. A shower of rust rained down from the connected lines running up the stone wall. “Mikey saved your life, for God’s sake! You’d be dead without us!”
Bob set the candle in the middle of the floor. At the same time, he pocketed the lighter, sat down, and flashed a smile. The shadows danced across his face, making him look almost as corpse-like as the bodies behind him.
“Mikey didn’t save my life. No, the darkness did.”
“Here we go again,” I whispered.
“Excuse me?” Bob snapped. The grin changed to a snarl. I was reminded of the wolves and their distant supernatural relative, the werewolf. “You better watch that smart mouth of yours, Grady.”
I offered him a smirk. “You have no idea how crazy you sound talking about that nonsense, do you?”
“Like the guy in the grocery store,” Stone said. “The guy I skewered with a ski pole. He babbled a bunch of batshit nonsense too, and look where it got him.”
Now that there was some light, I saw how beat up Stone’s face was. Dried blood had run from his nose and framed his mouth. One eye was swollen and half-closed. I guess he’d put up a fight, but that was expected. Stone always put up a fight.
Bob shot a menacing glare at my best friend. “It’s far from that, buddy. In fact, I’ve never felt more sane than I do now. They…touched me, you know, but not a damn thing happened.” He held his arms out. “Because here I am.”
“Something happened,” Mia said. “Look at you.”
“Yeah, look at me. I’ve blown past my peak and seem to only be climbing higher.” Bob waited a moment, brow wrinkled as he thought of his next words. “Wanna know my secret? Each time I bring them food, they reward me. Sure, they’re messy eaters, and they don’t clean up after themselves”—he threw a thumb over his shoulder at the bodies—“but it’s a small price to pay.”
Eleanor lowered her head and sobbed. “Please— Please, let us go.”
“I’m afraid I can’t, and you surely know that, dear. See, they don’t scare me as much as they did, but I wouldn’t renege on our deal. I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid.”
He tapped his chest. It made a hollow thunking sound. If he had ever possessed a heart, it was gone now.
“You’re fuckin’ crazy!” Mia shouted. “You’re a fuckin’ crazy old man!”
“And I wish I never saved you!” Mikey added. “I wish that icicle went through your face instead of your leg!”
“Like I said, Mikey, you didn’t save me.” Bob laughed, shook his head. “You really think that icicle went through my thigh on accident
?” To show just how deranged he was, he took a fist and punched himself in the leg, where the blood-soaked scarf was still wrapped tightly. A squelching sound followed, making my stomach lurch. “I’m perfectly fine. Yeah, I bleed like you do. I breathe and my heart pumps and my blood flows, but unlike you, I am on my way to immortality.”
“Bullshit,” Stone said. “You’re insane, that’s all.”
Bob walked to Stone’s corner, squatted, smiled, and then backhanded him across the face. The blow made a cracking sound that echoed through the wide basement. Stone barely moved. He only flexed his jaw as a fresh stream of blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
Furious, I tried ripping out of the zip tie, hoping the rusty pipe might give if the plastic didn’t, but I had no luck with either.
Bob laughed and sauntered back to the middle of the room. “My friends have granted me immortality in exchange for the talents I possess. That’s the deal. I catch their food for them and they feast. It’s much easier for someone like me, a human, to gain the trust of others. People are absurdly trusting these days, believe it or not, especially when you offer them shelter and a hot meal.”
He motioned back to the pile of bodies.
“And, as you can see, I’ve certainly been keeping my friends well-fed. Woodhaven may not be a big town, but it lies in the path of I-77, and all those people who think they can find safety and better weather down south tend to stick to the main highways. Call it a habit. This place is basically one giant spiderweb, and I’m the one who's spun the silk, who catches the passing insects, and who serves them to the tarantulas waiting in the shadows. Like I said, it’s a small price to pay for immortality.”
I shook my head. “Bullshit. It’s all bullshit and you know it.”
Whiteout (Book 3): The Numbing Page 12
