by Shows, Greg
“West Virginia.” Callie said after a while. “My grandparents are there. If they’re alive.”
Sadie had given Callie a dust mask to wear before they’d left the science building, and the short run they’d made over to the truck had already left the bulging white bubble covered in gray dust.
“I was taking Jenna 'cause her family’s dead. We were three miles south when the bikers got us.”
Callie had been a student at Blaine, she told Sadie, but since the Crisis she’d been living in the courthouse and jail at the center of town.
“We called it ‘the Alamo,’” she said. “Because this professor said that’s what it was like.”
"What about your parents?" Sadie asked.
Callie shook her head.
“Colorado,” she said.
It was all she needed to say. Even in the early days of the Crisis everyone knew that Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah were gone.
“Thar she blows,” Sadie said, as the black smoke she’d been expecting puffed upward from the science building, then expanded to a big black column. Seconds after she saw the smoke, a big man in blue coveralls came running toward the recreation center. Two younger, smaller men were running behind him.
“That’s Bryce,” Callie said through her teeth. Sadie glanced at Callie, who had the sawed off shotgun in her hands. Her fingers were wrapped around the forestock and grip so tightly that if it had been someone’s neck she’d have snapped it. “And his sicko sons.”
Sadie was relieved to see the men weren’t tracking her as they ran across the ashy ground. The two girls hadn’t exactly attempted to disguise their tracks when they’d come to the truck.
“Guess they didn’t bring enough water to put it out,” Sadie said, “and some jerk stole their extinguishers.”
Callie didn’t laugh, and nodded instead.
Some people don’t get irony.
Seconds after the three men had run into the recreation center, a dozen others came running out. They moved like a herd of wild animals toward the fire, though by the time they got to the science building it was obvious there was nothing they could do. They stood and watched it burn. A few men ran inside but came back out almost immediately.
“That’s our cue,” Sadie said.
She looked at Callie. The girl’s lips were trembling. “You want to stay here?”
“I do,” Callie said, nearly crying.
Sadie got a jolt of panic to her guts. She was terrified, but what she was about to do seemed less scary knowing Callie was going with her. She sighed with relief when Callie opened the pickup door and said, “Let’s go.”
They ran up the handicap ramp to the automatic doors. The doors were unlocked, but Sadie and Callie had to work to pry them apart so they could get inside.
Sadie could see why the bikers had chosen to enter and exit the rec center from the rear doorways, which was a pair of standard hinged glass doors with locking bars across them. The two girls pushed the sliding doors closed again once they were inside.
Sadie had left her pack in the truck and brought only what she’d needed: her pistol, her multitool, a tiny LED penlight, the vial of of potassium permanganate, the bottle of glycerine, and the silver foil.
She had a plan, and the cannibals here at the college weren’t going to like it.
The entryway was nothing more than a wide hallway with a check-in counter on one side. It had once been the place where students stopped before they went to the gymnasium, the weight room, the basement bowling alley, or the game room, with its rows of pool tables, ping pong tables, and foosball tables.
Little light made it inside, and an old boxy flashlight sat on the check-in counter, probably something the bikers used to light up the room when they were taking their bikes out on a raid.
The part of the building they’d entered was empty, but they could hear voices echoing down hallways, moans and cries, bumps and bangs that seemed to vibrate the walls. There were several barks and howls, like dogs that had been left penned too long, and the clanging and scraping of metal.
Along with all the sounds of life was the constant crackle of thunder.
An odd odor pervaded the building too, something like fresh mushrooms and B.O.
Sadie grabbed the flashlight and whispered, “Let’s go.”
According to Callie, the bikes would be in the student cafe, which was on the other side of the building. So she and Sadie passed into the darkness beyond the check-in counter.
“Ohhhh,” someone groaned. Someone else—a girl from the sound of it—giggled in response.
“Git your ass over here!” a man yelled, and the sound of flesh being slapped echoed down the hallway. Then there was a clang, as if a heavy weight had been dropped on a concrete floor.
A wail sounded, so desolate and despairing it gave Sadie a chill.
Someone else shouted “No! Please!”
Sadie considered the odds of successfully freeing people and told herself “no.”
“They torture people in the weight room,” Callie whispered.
“Yes they do,” Sadie whispered grimly, though Callie didn’t get her joke.
Sadie put a hand on Callie’s shoulder while Callie put her free hand on the wall. Slowly they traversed the black passage, both of them sliding their feet along as they went, not worrying much about the sounds they were making since the storm outside the building was raging and the people in the weight room were making so much noise.
As they moved forward, Callie whispered directions and told Sadie where various hallways went. The first one on the right led to the weight room and game room. The second one on the right went straight into a gymnasium, which exited into another hallway and led to the front entrance of the cafe. On the far side there were showers and restrooms.
The gymnasium was where most people stayed during the day, because of the skylights the college had installed in the roof.
At night, Sadie said, people slipped off to offices or supply closets or even dorm rooms in other buildings.
A short hallway to the left led to the building’s loading dock and the cafe’s employee entrance, Callie said.
Sadie nodded in the dark and set off down the hallway in front of Callie. She had her pistol out and her other arm stretched forward, her palm open.
Almost immediately the smell hit her nose. It was a combination of spoiled milk and rotting hamburger meat that got worse the farther along the hall she went. She made a face in the dark but kept moving forward.
She wanted badly to put her respirator on, but it was so dusty she wouldn’t have been able to see through its faceplate.
The hallway ended with a pair of doors that gave no resistance when Sadie pushed through them. As the doors swung inward the full force of the smell hit the girls.
Sadie gagged and retched and fought down her nausea while Callie shoved her mouth into the crook of her elbow and went into a coughing fit.
“I’ve never been back here,” Callie said as the two doors swung closed behind them. Then she bent over and fought to control her coughing. Sadie nodded in the dark and pushed the button on the top of the flashlight. Instantly she wished she hadn’t. The loading area was a nightmare. The remains of dead bodies lay against the two steel loading bay doors. Both doors were dull gray with two windows at head height. Dim light came in through the windows, but were as little help in illuminating the bay as the tiny square window set into the exit door to the right of the loading doors.
Sadie shined the light over the bodies and nearly threw up. The skulls had been stripped of all meat. The only skin remaining was on the crown of the skulls’ heads, and hair still clung to it. The meat had been peeled off the arms and legs of the corpses as well, and their chests had been spread open and emptied.
Surrounding the corpses were hundreds of human bones picked clean of flesh. They’d been tossed into the loading bay carelessly and left to decay for who knew how long—despite the fact the bay doors could have been opened and the
area cleared.
Rats and cockroaches scattered away from the bones in the beam of the flashlight, although the long columns of ants weaving in and out of the bones showed no interest in Sadie’s light.
Callie sobbed and Sadie moved the flashlight, sweeping it over the floor where it exposed hundreds of small black mounds. It took Sadie a few seconds to realize the mounds were human feces—some dried and shriveled and obviously old, others—the closest to them—still glistening with moisture. Wadded pieces of mottled paper lay everywhere, darkened and stained. A stack of hardbound library books sat next to the double doors they’d come through.
“Convenient,” Sadie said.
The book on top of the stack showed a lot of wear, where dozens of dirty of hands had torn sheets out for use. Out of curiosity Sadie looked at the title and saw the words: Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
Callie retched several times, and the water Sadie had given her to drink came up and splattered the wall next to them.
“Come on,” Sadie said, and they picked their way through the minefield of feces and bones until they reached the restaurant’s delivery door.
Sadie knew the proper thing to do was wait and listen to see if she could tell if anyone was on the other side, but she couldn’t take the stench in the loading bay. She turned the knob and jerked the door open.
She was nearly blinded by the Coleman lanterns and the fire, which was blazing away beneath a massive grill that had once been made for gas but had been converted to hold burning logs. Yellow and orange flames crackled and smoke rose up into a flared grill hood.
Sadie heard a clang and saw a dumpy old woman in a baggy black sweatshirt. The woman had a meat cleaver in her hand and was hacking apart a freshly skinned human leg.
Sadie stepped forward and Callie came behind her, pulling the door nearly closed.
The smell of cooking meat made Sadie’s mouth water and her stomach gurgle. But a quick reminder of what was likely cooking turned her stomach.
She stuck her pistol out in front of her, its hammer back, and moved to within ten feet of the cook.
“Don’t move,” Sadie said, but the old woman moved anyway, raising the cleaver and spinning around. The woman had white stringy hair and red cheeks. Wrinkles lined her face and a jagged scar crossed the bridge of her crooked nose, which had been broken multiple times.
“You ain’t gonna fire those guns,” the woman said, and Sadie saw she was missing both her top and bottom front teeth and several in the back. “My boys’ll be in here so fast you’ll think the angels of the Lord are coming down on you.”
“More like demons,” Callie said, and the woman laughed.
“Ain’t you dead yet?”
“Not hardly,” Callie said.
“Maybe not, but I bet your cooter’s real sore, now ain’t it?” she laughed. “My boys can fuck forever when they’re rolling.”
She ran at Sadie and Callie then, but being neither fast, nor graceful, she was easy to avoid.
Sadie stepped aside at the last second, swinging her pistol toward the woman’s belly. The pistol made a sick, crunching sound, and the woman doubled over, dropping the cleaver and tripping over the edge of a rubber floor mat.
Her arms pinwheeled and flailed, and she didn’t regain her balance until she was almost to Callie, who met her with a shotgun muzzle to the face.
“Ohhhhh,” the woman howled.
She staggered backwards, so Sadie swung her pistol against the woman’s back. It sounded like a meat hammer slamming into a steak. The woman crashed down on her belly and lay next to an industrial-sized mixing machine.
“You bitch,” she wailed.
“Be quiet,” Sadie said, and she knelt and put her knee into the woman’s back.
Sadie thought briefly of a rodeo she’d once attended with her grandfather as she pulled out the surgical tubing she’d found and wrapped it around the woman’s wrists.
Sadie didn’t like leaving the tubing behind, but she didn’t see anything else to tie the woman up with. She didn’t want to kill her. She hadn’t crossed the line into total savage depravity yet.
“Your boys are murdering rapists,” Sadie said as she wound the surgical tubing around the woman’s wrists and cinched a tight knot.
The old woman began to shake, but not with fear or sorrow.
She was laughing.
“They’re gonna rape and murder you, Missy,” she said. “I’ll be eating your titties for breakfast. You ever had grilled titty? It’s mighty sweet.”
Sadie turned and pulled one of the woman’s ankles up and lashed it against her wrists, then pulled the other ankle up and finished the hogtie.
Callie, who was stalking back and forth in front of a locked metal cabinet against a wall turned and ran to the woman, dropping the shotgun into the holster. She bent to pull the old woman’s tennis shoes and socks off her gnarled feet.
“These are mine,” Callie said, and she hopped up onto a stainless steel table to put them on.
“Go ahead and use ‘em awhile, slut,” the woman said. “I’ll get ‘em back soon as my boys get here and put the meat to your pussy again. You’ll be squealing for more like you were last night.”
Sadie watched Callie lace the shoes onto her feet and hop down from the table.
“Big Jim ain’t coming here,” Callie said.
Then without warning she pulled her leg back and kicked the old woman in the face. The blow was so hard it spun the woman around and knocked her head against the base of the big mixer. Blood spilled out of a gash Callie’s shoe had left, but if the kick hurt her the old woman didn’t show it.
“You kick like a girl,” she said, and giggled. It was then Sadie realized who was taking the meth. The woman, who looked eighty, was likely only in her fifties.
“I’m just warming up,” Callie said, then bent down and shoved her hand inside the top of the woman’s black sweatshirt. The woman tried to bite Callie’s wrist, but she pulled her hand back, her fingers clutching at a key on a loop of thin red rope. Callie twisted the loop of rope so that it slid around caught against the woman’s throat. The woman began to gag and choke.
“Got a knife?” Callie asked, and Sadie pulled her multitool out of her back pocket, opened a blade, and handed it over.
Callie sawed the knife against the rope, using the woman’s weight to apply downward pressure to the blade. The key came free in her hand and the woman collapsed to the floor.
Callie closed the multitool and handed it back.
“Come on,” Sadie said. “She’s trying to keep us here till they get back.”
Callie nodded and kicked the woman in the stomach.
“Big Jim’s dead, you old whore.”
The old woman gasped, shook her head, then glared at Callie.
Callie ignored her, and returned to the locked cabinet. A quick turn of the key popped it open. Callie dropped the lock to the floor and opened the doors.
“What the...?” Sadie said without thinking.
Inside, stacked neatly on shelf after shelf were hundreds of cans of food and dozens of various boxes of pasta and cereal. There was a brown box with the lid flaps torn off, and inside it was an assortment of Snickers bars, Mr. Goodbars, Butterfingers, Pop Tarts, various granola bars, and Rice Krispie treats.
Callie turned to glare at the old woman.
“You killed Jenna to eat when you got food already?”
The woman smiled.
“That’s our emergency rations. For when there ain’t no more people to eat.”
“Monsters,” Sadie observed, her voice flat.
The old woman giggled.
“You’ll be doing the same,” she cackled. “Just you wait. You’ll be enjoying the Black Feast just like us. Maybe you won’t be so high and mighty when there ain’t no food around—.”
“Shut up,” Sadie said, and looked at Callie.
She could almost see the thoughts in Callie’s head as the girl considered whether or not to blast the
old woman. She was relieved when Callie pulled out a Snickers bar, opened it, and ate half of it in one bite.
She pulled out a Rice Krispie treat and tossed it at Sadie, who caught it and tore into it almost as fast as Callie had torn into the Snickers bar.
Callie finished the candy in the time it took her to carry the box to the kitchen exit. She put the box on the floor and hurried back toward Sadie.
Sadie was impressed with Callie’s choice of food selection. The candy represented the biggest caloric bang for the buck, and it was what Sadie would have selected.
“Probably give me the shits,” Callie said as she pulled the shotgun out of the holster and walked by Sadie and the old woman.
“Me too,” Sadie said, and watched Callie push through the gray metal door and out into the cafe dining area.
Sadie knelt down next to the old woman again.
“You start screaming,” Sadie said, “I’ll slit your throat.”
“I saw right away you was the one to worry about,” she said. “You a cold bitch, ain’t you?”
“Remember what I said,” Sadie said and stood up and walked out of the kitchen to find Callie.
Chapter 9
The bikes were where Callie said they’d be, lined up in the center of the dining area, pointing outward toward the Rec. Center’s main hallway—a hallway that ran straight by the gymnasium and game room entrances and down to the automatic glass doors and the handicapped ramp outside it.
The only light came from a single burning candle melted onto a cashier’s counter at the front of the restaurant.
The tables that had once filled the cafe had been chopped up and burned, Callie told Sadie, and all that remained were the booths that lined the restaurant’s walls.
The only problem Sadie could see was that there were only six bikes.
“Sometimes Bryce and his sons park over in the gym by the rear entrance,” Callie whispered. “They make everybody else park in here.”
Sadie, remembering how long she and Callie had been in the building, dug into her parka and went to work. The sound of men arguing echoed out of the gymnasium and into the café.
“Get all the gas caps off,” Sadie told Callie, who nodded and began unscrewing the gas caps.
