by Sam Sisavath
“Thank you.”
“On the count of five. Ready?”
She nodded.
“Five…four…three…two…one!”
Will lifted his foot, and Lara quickly brought the backpack down over the moving hand. She trapped it against the floor, then scooped it up with a sweeping move that tossed the hand into the bottom of the backpack.
She instantly felt it moving, crawling up the interior of the backpack by stabbing the sides with its fingernails. She zipped the backpack shut and tossed it across the room. It lay still for a moment, but then the hand started moving again, punching against the backpack as if trying to rip itself free. It had no leverage and no strength, and the backpack didn’t move from the spot where it had landed.
“Simultaneously the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen and quite possibly the hottest,” Danny said. “How exactly do you plan on studying that, Calamity Jane?”
She didn’t know how to answer. She hadn’t really thought that far ahead. “We can learn a lot from it,” she said, looking back at the two of them. She could feel Will’s eyes on her. He was still far from convinced. “I’m tired of thinking about these things like they’re supernatural creatures. I don’t think they are. And that hand might hold the answer…tomorrow, or a week from now, or maybe even a month from now. It’s an opportunity we have to take.”
She prepared herself for a bombardment of questions, doubts, maybe even accusations. But instead Will just grinned at her and said, “Looks like you just lost your title, Danny.”
“Oh, she can have it,” Danny said, grinning at her, too.
“What are you talking about?” she said. She looked at Will, then Danny, then back at Will. She grew quickly annoyed. “What title?”
“Captain Optimism,” Danny said. “Because you’re already assuming we’re going to survive tonight. That’s kind of precious.”
*
With Vera and Luke sleeping soundly in the office, Lara and Carly gathered in the lobby with Will and Danny. They sat across from the men, Carly keeping one eye on the barrier over the front doors and the other on the backpack lying on the floor next to her.
Every now and then, Lara felt the hand moving inside the backpack, stretching against the fabric, as if seeking a new route of escape.
“You’re really going to study it?” Carly asked.
Lara nodded. “We don’t know anything about them. What they are. Aren’t you curious?”
“I’ve always been pretty good at concentrating on what’s ahead. Right now, I don’t care about what makes them tick.”
Not wanting to know was not in Lara’s nature. It was why she had been so drawn to medical school, and why, despite the fact that it was a severed hand moving on its own, she couldn’t take her eyes off the backpack.
“I thought lizards did that,” Carly said. “You know, if you cut off a limb, the limb still keeps moving for a while. Or even grows back. Or maybe that was just some movie I saw.”
Lara nodded. She was half right. “A lizard can regrow a tail if it has to shed it to, say, escape a predator, but the tail won’t be the same. It can’t actually grow a new leg, that’s just a myth. Invertebrates can, though. Like flat worms. You cut off twenty pieces, and you’d get twenty smaller worms. Even crickets can regrow legs. Some amphibians can regenerate limbs, too. But these things… It’s sentient. It can actually think.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t just flopping around? I’ve seen dogs that got run over and were still moving their heads afterwards, even though their body was crushed.”
“I don’t think so. But there’s a way to test that out.”
“Ugh,” Carly said, unconvinced. She stood up. “I’m going to check on Vera and Luke, and…” she gave the backpack one last look, “…get the hell away from that thing.”
Lara smiled as Carly disappeared into the hallway.
“To what end?” Will asked from across the room.
“What?”
“The hand.” Will was watching her closely. He had very soft brown eyes. “Study it to what end?”
“The more we know about them, the more we’ll know about how to kill them. You’re interested in knowing that, aren’t you?”
“Silver does that.”
“Maybe there’s an easier way. A less dangerous way for us.”
“‘It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.’”
“I don’t know what that means,” Lara said.
“Sun Tzu. From The Art of War.” He shrugged. “I read sometimes.”
“And sometimes I watch TV, but you don’t see me bragging about it,” Danny chimed in.
Will ignored him. “You need to be careful with it, Lara. We don’t know what it’s capable of. If you’re right, and it is sentient, you need to always take precautions before you do anything with it.”
“I will,” she said defensively.
“We need to make an agreement,” he insisted. “No bringing that thing out unless either Danny or I are there. Or Kate or Ted. Anyone with a gun.”
“I have a gun.”
“It’s going to be hard reaching for your gun with that thing’s fingers wrapped around your throat. You said it yourself. It’s sentient. It’s thinking. That makes it extremely dangerous.”
He was right, she realized. She had been so giddy about acquiring the hand, about all the tests she wanted to perform on it, that she had temporarily forgotten what it was, or where it had come from.
“So we’re agreed,” he said.
“Agreed,” she nodded. “I won’t do anything without someone else there with a gun.”
Will looked satisfied with her answer.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For not shooting it.”
“You made a compelling argument.”
“Blonde hair and blue eyes don’t hurt, either,” Danny said. “Willie boy’s a sucker for blondes.”
“Shut up, Danny,” Will said.
“Don’t try to deny—” Danny stopped suddenly and glanced over at Will. “You hear that?”
“Yeah,” Will said.
“I don’t hear anything,” Lara said, suddenly feeling very anxious.
Like the others, she had become attuned to Will and Danny’s reactions. When they were calm, so was she. And when they were alarmed, panic klaxons went off in her head.
Will and Danny stood up quickly and peered through the peepholes into the parking lot beyond.
“What do you see out there?” she asked. She stood up and walked across the lobby.
Will said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, “Sonofabitch.”
He turned and ran toward her, his rifle in one hand, shotgun in the other, and shouted something at her. But she didn’t hear it because the entire wall behind him and Danny—who was also running—suddenly exploded, and a massive boom overwhelmed all her senses.
A split second later she felt something hit her in the right temple and knew instantly she was bleeding. She didn’t have time to reach up and feel the wound, to gauge how deep it was, because Will had rammed into her with his shoulder and they both flew backwards and down to the floor as the wall behind him—or a million pieces of it—flew through the air at them like heat-seeking missiles.
Fragments of concrete whistled past her face. Big chunks hit her in the chest, and maybe the face, too, though she couldn’t be sure. Pain and noise and white light from one of the LED lanterns flashed across her universe, splashing its heat across her face as it went. Somehow the lantern missed her head and crashed into the wall behind her, sparks flying into the air. She expected the entire room to go dark, but the other lanterns stayed in position.
Loud crashing sounds, like thunder, slammed very close to her ears, and she realized Wi
ll and Danny were shooting their rifles, even as a hand grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to her feet. She had trouble assuming control over her legs, and she felt herself dragged along the floor as a result.
He’s going to pull my arm right out of its socket, and it’s going to hurt. It’s going to hurt a lot…
The human arm was not meant to be dragged, the socket that connected it to the shoulder could only take so much pull before it snapped loose. Lara found, through some research, that tearing a human limb off was much harder than most people realized, and even the tried and true method of quartering by four horses was a major hassle, not only for the executioner, but for the horses.
These inane facts, seemingly from another lifetime, flitted across her mind as Will dragged her along the floor.
She felt a wetness on her face, and remembered that she was bleeding.
What’s that phrase? Oh, right. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig.
As she peered through a mask of flowing blood, she saw them coming through the hole in the wall, across the bank lobby. They were climbing over the great big steel machine (A car, dummy, it’s just a car) as if they were moving on spring-assisted stilts.
She saw five—no, more than that, maybe ten—then ten became twenty.
No, wrong again. There had to be at least fifty of them trying to squeeze in through the hole all at the same time.
Lara stared, mesmerized by their graceful gait as they climbed the length of the badly crumpled car and entered the lobby with great alacrity. Their black eyes darted left and right as soon as they crossed the threshold, dark, tightened skin shimmering unnaturally against the bright LED floodlights.
And the booming. Loud, crashing, earsplitting booms of guns firing around her, a never ending cascade that started, amazingly enough, to fade into the background, until they were just mere echoes, and she was suddenly left with just her thoughts.
I never finished medical school. If Mom ever found out, she’d be so disappointed.
I’m sorry, Mom, I’ll try to do better in the next life…
CHAPTER 26
KATE
SHE HEARD A loud crashing sound, like a bomb had gone off next door. It came from the lobby, where Will and Danny were holed up with Lara. And the last time she checked, Carly was out there, too.
It was an intensely grinding sound, like metal against concrete. Then gunfire, and she knew Will and Danny were shooting. First they were firing single shots, but then she heard the roar of their M4A1s on fully automatic.
That was the dead giveaway that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Ted, sitting down the hallway a few yards from her, threw a quick look over his shoulder and she saw large, terrified eyes underneath the LED lanterns hung above him.
“Stay here!” she shouted, leaping to her feet.
She ran up the hallway. She saw Carly up ahead, turning when she heard Kate coming up on her.
“Don’t leave Vera!”
Carly nodded, but Kate was already running past her and out into the lobby.
She came right up against Will as he was backing up, dragging something on the floor with him.
Lara.
Her body limp as Will pulled her back by the wrist while he continued firing with the M4A1 using his free hand. Danny was next to him, firing on full-auto at the far wall.
Then Kate saw them.
A swarm of black death, flooding in through a massive hole in the wall. The bank doors with their thick, reinforced barrier were still there. But that didn’t matter now, and the sight of the still-standing doors next to the gaping hole in the wall looked patently absurd. She stared at the front grill of a four-door Chevrolet sedan, covered in brick and mortar and dust, and over the roof of the vehicle, at the nebulous moonlit parking lot of the strip mall beyond.
Every time Danny and Will shot one of the creatures, two or three (or five) instantly took its place, leaping over the quickly piling bodies. The front of the lobby was covered in black, oozing, contaminated blood and shriveled forms, like a growing landfill of black prunes with arms and legs, heads and eyes.
Through the fog and gunfire, she heard Will screaming: “I’m out! I’m out!”
She ran to him and got a quick glimpse of Lara on the floor. She hardly recognized the pretty blonde girl from this morning. Lara’s face was covered in a mask of blood, and she blinked her eyes rapidly, as if trying desperately to get her bearings.
“Go!” Kate screamed.
Will pulled Lara past her, trying to reload at the same time. It seemed like an impossible task, but he was actually dragging Lara and reloading at the same time. She didn’t know how that was even possible.
Kate switched her M4A1 to full-auto and, bracing against the kick she knew was coming, began firing into the wall of ghouls rushing through the wall. There were so many of them, filling every inch of cold, brightly lit open space, that it was impossible to miss. She didn’t even have to aim, she just concentrated her fire into the thickest part of the mob.
Danny was suddenly next to her, backing up, shouting, “Changing!” as he dropped an empty magazine and quickly inserted a new one. A second later, he shouted, “Go go go!” and began firing again.
Kate backed up, still firing. She was stunned when she fired the last bullet and the M4A1 stopped pounding against her shoulder.
My God, already?
She quickly hit the switch to release the empty magazine and snatched a new one from one of the pouches around her waist.
Danny stood still in front of her, holding his position, firing calmly and almost point-blank into the creatures as they tried to bull rush him. He was conserving bullets, firing a burst into this section, another into that, and back and forth. Calmly. So damn calmly. She wondered if she could ever be that calm in the face of certain, horrifying death?
She jammed a fresh magazine into the rifle. “Go go go!”
Danny dropped his magazine and stepped back behind her, and she heard him reloading as she fired off her second magazine.
The ghouls kept coming.
They were feverish, rabid, and the wanton disregard they were showing for their own lives was unfathomable to Kate. Their bodies had become so thin and frail that she could see her bullets go right through them when they didn’t hit bone, continuing and hitting the second and even third ghoul—and even speckling what was left of the wall—behind them.
Kate knew she was halfway through her second magazine when she felt a hand touch her shoulder and heard Will’s voice, calm and shouting at the same time next to her, “Manager’s office! Go go go!”
She didn’t move right away. She fired off the remaining bullets from her magazine before stepping back, passing Will, who had taken her spot. Danny was backing up and reloading again. They were moving backward the entire time, the sound of machinegun fire never ceasing for even a second.
As she stepped back toward the office her sneakers slid in liquid, making a squishy sound, and she looked down at a thick trail of blood leading into the hallway and through the door into the office.
Lara’s blood…
Then Will and Danny were almost on top of her. She quickly stepped over the blood and continued down the hallway.
Will was shooting with the shotgun now, racking the forend and shooting, racking and shooting, without end, burning through the weapon’s seven-shot capacity at a dizzying pace. The ghouls were now so close she could hear the sound of silver-coated bullets slapping into flesh and bone, and the cries of ghouls as they continued to throw themselves into what was left of the lobby. Between the shotgun blasts and Danny’s M4A1 firing on full-auto, she was only vaguely aware of her heart thrumming mercilessly against her chest.
Will shouted, “I’m out!”
Danny stepped forward into the hallway and began firing with his own shotgun, racking and shooting, the blasts deafening in the narrow confines of the hallway. Would she still have her hearing come morning?
If they made it to morning
. At that moment, she wasn’t so sure.
Something crashed behind her, and she spun around.
Ted hadn’t moved from the end of the hallway and had held sentry over the back door throughout the entire ordeal. He didn’t see the ceiling behind him cave in as something bulky, square, and massive came crashing through, taking a pair of LED lanterns with it, slamming into the hallway floor with such force that she actually heard it over the roar of shotgun blasts a mere three feet behind her. The heavy object splintered the tiled floor as if it were wood, sending chunks of debris into the air.
A projectile scraped her temple, drawing blood, and she instantly lost her balance and groped at the wall to keep herself upright.
Ceiling debris hadn’t even begun to scatter into the air when two dark, skeletal shapes fell out of the ceiling and landed on top of the object—an air conditioner unit, the size of a small closet. One of the creatures leaped at Ted who got off a shot, turning the ghoul’s head to mush, but then—more fell through the hole. There were so many of them they took up her entire line of sight. She couldn’t even see Ted, though his shotgun continued firing somewhere on the other side.
Will was behind her, grabbing her by the shoulder and shoving her toward the office, shouting: “Inside, Kate! Inside now!”
Ted’s down there! What about Ted?
But her words wouldn’t come out. Danny’s shotgun fired behind her, Will’s next to her, tearing one ghoul, then two, then a half-dozen to blistering pieces before her eyes.
Will gave her another push and she fell through the office door, Will and Danny right behind her as Carly, who had been waiting beside the door, slammed it shut and threw down a large steel bar they had welded to the wall earlier in the day. The heavy object fell over the door, landing into a waiting latch on the other side of the wall and snapping into place with a loud crashing sound that made Kate’s ears ring.
Immediately the door shook, as the ghouls crashed into it from the other side, the heavy, loud, persistent thoom-thoom-thoom! vibrating through every inch of the office.
She stood in the center of the room, the M4A1 hanging loosely at her side. She wasn’t sure if it was shock or terror, or both, that had left her paralyzed, but she had become an observer, watching the door shake and the latch threatening to come loose from the wall as the ghouls slammed smashed their bodies with wild abandon into it over and over and over again.
