Innocence Ends

by Robinson, Nikolas P.

  He creeps along the side of the house, a tight squeeze between the home and the fence separating the adjoining property from this one. More noise from behind him, back in the alley, but he doesn’t look back.

  The front of the house will leave him exposed, nothing but a stereotypical picket fence along the sidewalk, but there’s no movement he can see and the house is mostly sheltered from the closest streetlight nearly half a block away.

  Silently, he rushes up the steps as fast as he can without making a ruckus of it.

  The door handle turns easily in his hands and he pushes the door open, wary that there could be anything waiting for him in the dark interior. He pulls the door closed again and slips along the wall to the right, trying to avoid standing out in silhouette at all.

  Miles crosses the dark living room, his movements slow and deliberate. The house appeared empty as he crossed the backyard and peered through the first-floor windows that faced the alley, but that was no guarantee that the occupants weren’t present. The door had been unlocked, which meant that there was a good chance he wouldn’t be alone inside, and he had let himself in with all of the stealth that he could manage, conscious of just how much risk he was taking.

  He stands silently in the entryway between the kitchen and living space for close to five minutes, listening to the silence of the place, attuned to the slightest whisper of his breathing until the sound of his pulse in his ears echoes like a drum. He doesn’t make the slightest motion until he assures himself that nothing moves in the almost pitch black interior of the residence.

  His foot descends softly and the faintest creak of the floorboard beneath causes him to immediately shift his full weight back to the other. His breath halts mid-exhale and his eyes widen as he scans his surroundings with sweeping movements of his eyes; counting on his peripheral vision to catch anything that might pose a threat, his head remains, like the rest of his body, as still as a living statue, each muscle tensed to react at the slightest impetus.

  Even within the deathly silent structure, he is aware that the noise couldn’t have been a fraction of the volume that it was to him, but he is unwilling to risk the possibility of being discovered by anyone that might be there. There was no chance of the sound carrying beyond the walls, but still, Miles worries that his misstep could draw the attention of either of the threats currently roaming the town. The tension and heightened state of fear are making him paranoid, he knows. He’s seen it countless times in war zones, but he’s seen that same paranoia save plenty of lives including his own.

  The kitchen holds little of value, though he grabs a butcher knife from the block on the counter, feeling better just having something he can use to defend himself as he searches the rest of the house.

  In the den, he discovers something that makes him want to cry tears of gratitude, above the mantle is an older over-under shotgun. It wouldn’t have been his choice of firearm, but under the circumstances, it feels like a miracle being bestowed upon him. He moves as quickly as he can without risking tripping over something and slides the gun from the hooks that held it in place. For a moment Miles’ face displays a sense of awe and gratitude like he was receiving communion. In a chest to the left of the fireplace, he finds the box of shells; birdshot is not what he would have preferred, but it’s better than nothing at all. He breaks the gun open and loads two shells.

  Slowly, carefully, Miles explores the ground level of the house, checking every door including those for pantries and cupboards. It’s difficult without any light source to aid him in his search, but his eyes have adjusted enough that he doesn’t want to risk destroying his night vision by using the flashlight feature on his phone or the small LED attached to his keychain.

  In the den again, he severs the leg of a table as quietly as possible, wanting to be sure that there’s something other than the shotgun to rely on in a pinch and something with better reach than the knife he’s still carrying. The ground floor is clear and it’s time to head upstairs.

  The second stair from the top creaks beneath his weight and he stops dead, slowing his breathing to listen to the noise of the house itself. The rain should have masked the sound, he hopes, but it would similarly mask any other noises he might need to hear. The landing of the second floor leads off to a single door to his right and a hall to his left with two more doors that direction, all of them closed.

  The room to his right is a simple bathroom, white tile floors aiding him in seeing that there’s no one inside.

  The first door along the hall opens on a bedroom that appears to be a child’s room, as empty as the rest of the house.

  The second door along the hall is open already and he silently slips through and into what must be the master bedroom. He can’t quite see the far edges of the room, but he feels the space around him open up.

  There is a sudden noise to his right and Miles turns that direction, his feet sliding as he pivots.

  In the darkness, something latches onto him with hands clawing at him like a hungry animal, clutching at him and struggling to pull him towards it, or itself towards him. Either way, it amounts to the same thing.

  The shotgun in Miles’ hands erupts with an almost deafening explosion that immediately sets his ears ringing and the hands are no longer there holding onto him. Something wet and substantial hits the ground a few feet from where he stands. Almost immediately he begins walking backward slowly towards the open doorway that he knows is there, and he can hear the hungry thing in the darkness shifting itself around, breath gurgling in its throat. He can’t be sure where he hit it with the shot, but the damage has to be massive at that proximity.

  It drags itself across the floor, slipping out of the deeper shadows of the bedroom, the gender that it might have been before disguised by the severity of its wound. Still, it moves inexorably forward, hauling itself forward with single-minded focus, desperate to reach its prey even as the final traces of life begin to dissipate within it. There is no question that its momentum should have ceased sometime before; everything he can make out in the darkness tells him this person should be dead, but somehow it just keeps dragging itself along, leaving a trail of blood punctuated by viscera at irregular intervals. Miles is grateful that he can’t make out greater detail in the darkness and that the blast from the shotgun had temporarily impacted his night vision.

  Miles had seen some terrible things in combat, been party himself to some of the most monstrous actions that one human being can perform against another, but in the minute or so that he has spent watching this creature crawl its way towards him in the half-light, he feels bile surging against his esophagus.

  Worse than the appearance; the hoarse, guttural groan that issues from its ravaged throat forces Miles’ teeth to clench.

  Finally, Miles raises the table leg, wielding it like a sledgehammer, and brings it crashing down onto the ghoul’s skull, again and again until he can no longer distinguish between the sounds of splintering wood and bone. So much more silent than the shotgun that had initially shredded its body had been. The noise is still so much worse. He finally takes a moment to mutter a prayer to any gods that might be listening that the sound of gunfire somehow hadn’t managed to attract the attention of others like the thing he has just dispatched, perhaps within the same house.

  “This simply cannot be happening,” Miles whispers to himself as he begins to analyze what he can remember of the town’s layout, working out the best route available to him back to Gale’s home and the SUV that he left parked there.

  Everyone would be making their way there as well, anyone still alive at least. But the rest of them don’t all know about the firearms and ammunition that Miles carries in a false compartment in the back of every vehicle he’s owned, so he muses hopefully that Gale is armed, or he makes it back there quickly enough for it to make a difference. It seems that his obsessive preparations for terrible scenarios has finally proven itself to be not only worthwhile but imperative.

  He drops the splintered t
able leg, casting it aside with disgust.

  He heads downstairs and slips back through the front door, not knowing if the kitchen exit will be safe and almost certain that the noise of the shotgun had gotten the attention of whatever had been moving around in the alley behind the house.

  21

  Finally having lost the crazy locals who were hunting him, catching his breath and his bearings next to a dumpster; Hewitt realizes he drew the short-end of the stick when he and Miles had diverged to make a more difficult target for the assholes. He is heading in the opposite direction of Gale’s house and he can’t be certain just how far out of the way he’s gotten or how difficult it’s going to be to get back on track.

  Tucked against the wall of the building, hidden in the shadow provided by the dumpster, he’s heard multiple groups of people passing by and it’s only a matter of time before one of these gangs heads down the alley where he will be an easy target.

  This place is turning out to be far from the restful vacation spot he imagined when they were at the lake just the day before.

  He has no idea what is going on around him, but Hewitt knows that he and his friends are somehow the targets of some crazy doomsday cult or something equally unlikely. He does his best not to think about the fact that Kateb had been killed by a god damn zombie, or someone so strung out and sick that they may as well have been one. He shifts his focus to other things only to have momentary flashes of what happened in the bar force their way to the forefront of his mind whether he likes it or not.

  He shakes his head in frustration, trying to think his way out of this, desperate to find a sensible solution to something that thus far hasn’t made a bit of sense.

  First things first, he needs to find better shelter than this wet alley, the smell of garbage piled up only feet away from him is rekindling his desire to vomit.

  He dodges his way through the shadows, feeling at least a little bit lucky that the power is out throughout the town aside from the occasional street lights that must have been storing solar power before the storm hit.

  His chance of making it to Gale’s house plummets as he reaches the end of the alley. The street is teeming with a crowd of local people waving flashlights and shouting and they’re all clustered in the direction he needs to go. The opposite direction seems clear but there’s less light that direction which could be a good thing or the worst thing possible. He considers returning to the street from which he’d entered the alley, wondering if maybe it’ll be clearer that way, but as he glances behind him he sees silhouettes moving down the path, silent as ghosts.

  His decision made for him, Hewitt slips out of the alley, hugging the wall as if his life depends on it, which it very well might, and when he’s confident that he’s made it to deeper darkness, he begins to run.

  Of course, he’s running further away from his destination, but going the wrong way and staying alive is better than going the really wrong way and winding up very much dead.

  He only has to avoid a couple of smaller parties, presumably hunting for him. He finally makes it to a more residential neighborhood on the far side of town. Which is, by far, more disturbing than the residents who were actively hunting for him

  Ducking into a tool shed that was thankfully left accessible with a padlock that hadn’t been engaged, Hewitt is out of the rain for a minute and can catch his breath. He’s more exhausted than he could have anticipated from the constant stops and starts as he evaded patrols and made his way to this relative safety.

  The town has become something sinister.

  The quaint, small-town environment feels like it’s closing in around him as Hewitt peers out from his hiding place in the shed through sheets of pouring rain.

  Shelter was hard to find, but at least he’s tucked away from the worst of the precipitation where no one is going to see him without actively searching for him. He can finally relax for a bit and attempt to find some way to backtrack where he needs to be going. It probably won’t afford him enough time to analyze what had happened, but it was going to be better than nothing.

  He worries that he might have experienced some sort of massive disconnect from the real world and those fears only get worse the more he attempts to analyze the events in the bar. The woman who attacked Kateb had appeared to be a zombie, something right out of the movies they’d all watched since they were children. His earlier thoughts that she might be a junkie were nothing more than a transparent attempt to rationalize the irrational. That is where this nightmare had started. But the more he thinks about things, he recalls a strange sort of tension from the locals even before that event had taken place. There was a tension even back when they’d been in the diner only a couple of days before.

  At the time, Hewitt dismissed it as being more of an internal problem with his perspective. He felt like they were outsiders because they were, and he had always been sort of sensitive about that kind of thing. He’d always been more sensitive than it made sense to be about a lot of things. An off-hand remark from Miles had led him to suspect that it might be less a matter of his perspective than something to do with the demographics of the region and a whole lot to do with an undercurrent of unrepentant racism.

  Looking back now, it all becomes more ominous and foreboding.

  After the unexpected and fatal assault, the casual, cruel indifference of both staff and patrons at the bar had been almost as horrifying as the attack itself. His friend was bleeding profusely from the tear in his throat and the relatively minor wound on his arm but the only people who seemed to be interested were his friends.

  The other people in the bar didn’t even seem to care much about the local woman who’d been killed right in front of them after she’d attacked Kateb. It was obvious, in retrospect, that there was something wrong with these people; but Hewitt and his friends had more pressing matters to worry about at the time.

  Miles had tried his hardest to stop the bleeding, but Kateb was too far gone. Even with medical care immediately available, it would have done no good.

  The desperate escape from the bar and the locals who’d been lurking outside in wait seems like a blur. The whole damn thing seems like a senseless, feverish blur.

  They’d separated, just like idiots always seem to when these types of scenarios play out in movies, which Hewitt now suspects might not have been the brightest idea; but the locals had become hostile towards them in a way that transcended scowls and unpleasant looks.

  Whether it is indicative of burgeoning insanity from being pushed beyond what he’s prepared to cope with or simply a terribly off-color sense of humor, Hewitt has what he considers to be a great idea. His iPod was still in his pocket and he fishes it out, connecting the earbuds and placing the left in his ear, leaving the right dangling so that he will still be able to hear anyone that might be sneaking up on him.

  It only takes him a few seconds of scrolling through the music library to find what he was looking for, and there it is, the perfect song for the occasion.

  As Escape From Hellview begins playing he grabs a hammer and a small camping hatchet from the shelves within the shed, ventures carefully out of the temporary shelter, and slowly jogs through the darkened streets. Through the downpour, he darts from shadow to shadow.

  The town seems empty but he knows that is an illusion. There is danger everywhere around him and one misstep is all it will take to bring that danger down on him in a bad way.

  He has to find his way back to Gale’s house.

  First, he has to find a more secure shelter and straighten his head out after what had happened to Kateb.

  His mind keeps circling back to the reality that he has to find his friends again, and Gale’s house is where they should all be going; it’s the only place he can think to go under the circumstances. If they aren’t there, he has no idea where they could be, but at least it serves as a place to start.

  The town can’t be more than seven miles from one end to the other, but the relative safety of Gale’s house f
eels a world away in every sense possible. He has no idea what sort of hurdles are going to be blocking his attempt to get back where he hopes he’ll find his friends again.

  The heavy rain and limited visibility have already made navigating these unfamiliar, narrow streets difficult enough, but he is actively being hunted by not only the lunatics living in this town but the zombies as well, assuming there are more of them. Lacking anything better to call them, that’s what they were. Zombies.

  It’s like being trapped in a nightmare.

  There’s no telling whether Kateb has been the only casualty by this time.

  For all he knows, he is the last of his friends still breathing and untouched by whatever has tainted the residents; but he can’t allow himself to dwell on those thoughts or he might just give up all hope.

  22

  Abraham has a difficult time processing what he’s seeing, peering down from the attic window through the torrent. Ben sleeps fitfully on a nest of folded blankets off to the right of the dusty aperture.

  Two larger groups of flashlight and headlamp equipped locals converge on a solitary figure who’s run out of places to run. The individual doesn’t look familiar to him. Even over the distance and through the windblown sheets of rain buffeting the world outside, Abraham can tell this isn’t one of his friends. He has to assume, the victim being a stranger, it must be another local.

  Whoever this stranger is, they fight like a trapped animal. Clearly, they don’t belong to either of the two groups converging on them.

  The shouting and jeering voices are only occasionally audible between bursts of thunder and the rain pummeling the roof, but it doesn’t require much clarity to register the hostility in the distance.

  These people are a mob and an angry one. Obviously, it isn’t just Abraham and his friends being targeted by these assholes, but that isn’t a source of comfort once he takes the time to unpack the implications of that detail.