When There's No More Room in Hell 3

by Luke Duffy

  The blast of the rifle echoed around in the room, causing his ears to pop and ring. He squeezed the trigger again as he took a step backwards towards the chair. More plaster exploded in a cloud of white chalky mist and the wood splintered as the rounds punched through the door.

  He turned and jumped to the chair as the door shifted again, this time moving the bed from behind it a few more centimetres. Cold hands forced their way through the ever-increasing gap and clutched at the air between them and their prey. The rotten faces and eyes squeezing through the doorway caught sight of Stan's warm living flesh.

  Stan was wild with fear. He bounded and jumped for the stool. His foot landed flat on the chair and his body sprang upwards, his fingers reaching out for the hands of Stu and Kieran. His palm made contact with the forearm of Stu and he felt himself being lifted upwards, but the momentum of his vault from the chair was too strong. The kinetic energy of his leap was still carrying him forward, and before Kieran could get a grip on him, he slipped from Stu's grasp and crashed into the wardrobe that was placed against the wall.

  The first bodies smashed through the door, forcing the bed away to the side. Stu began to fire into them, dropping them with precision shooting, as his bullets ploughed through their decaying brains.

  More forced their way into the room, stumbling and falling over the bodies on the floor, their eyes fixed on Stan as he scrambled to his feet.

  They were too close; Stan could see that. He would never make it for a second try at the loft. He looked up at Kieran, who was still reaching for him and screaming his name, and then he looked back at the creatures stalking towards him.

  He fired again, spraying the advancing ghouls with a swarm of deadly metal projectiles. More of them fell before him as he backed away from them and into the corner.

  His weapon stopped.

  He looked down, terrified that his only defence had turned against him. The cocking handle was to the rear, showing an empty chamber and magazine. In his panic, his brain failed to fight through the fog of fear and remind him that he needed to eject the empty magazine and replace it with a full one.

  "Shit," he screamed as tears ran down his cheeks.

  Jim and Stu poured fire down from above him and Kieran was still calling his name and reaching out to him, but Stan could not move. He was frozen to the spot with terror as he watched the grotesque faces of the creatures as they crawled, staggered and slithered towards him.

  Heads, limbs, and abdomens exploded as they were hit with bullets, but they refused to fall back under the torrent of fire.

  Stan screamed over again, shaking his head and crying with fear, clutching his empty rifle in his hands as he slid down the wall, curling himself into a ball. He sobbed and wailed as he watched the feet of the corpses close in around him.

  "No, please no," he pleaded, "please, no."

  Stu could no longer see Stan. There were too many bodies in the room.

  Kieran fired frantically with his pistol through the hatch and into the backs of the dead converging on the corner where his friend lay huddled.

  "Stan!" he screamed, tears filling his eyes and blurring his vision. "Stan, I'm coming for you, Stan!"

  Jim jumped across the hatch and smashed his shoulder into the chest of Kieran to stop him from throwing himself down from the loft. The impact sent them both sprawling across the floor, knocking the wind from Kieran and incapacitating him for a few moments as his eyes rolled and his senses jarred.

  The screams began.

  Blood curdling and ear splitting as the dead tore into Stan in the room below. They howled and wailed in reply, the excitement of the feast rippling through the crowd and sending the room into an eruption of flailing arms and thrashing heads, as their teeth snapped together in anticipation of gaining some flesh for their selves.

  The shrieks of agony from his friend registered in Kieran's ears as his senses returned to him. He rolled and scrambled to the hatch, ignoring the pain in his chest.

  "Stan," he cried.

  His voice was weak and full of emotion. He called over again, each time his words becoming fainter and less audible as the tears coursed down his face, as his friend's howls and shrieks became fainter.

  A short while later, the screaming stopped, but the dead continued their feast.

  10

  The basement echoed with the constant drip of water from the old pipes; the tightly packed enclosure reeked with the dank, mouldy smell from decades of slow rot seeping in through the brickwork from the ground outside. Sixteen men, women, and children were squeezed into the small, gloomy cellar, and already they were beginning to suffer.

  The small confines of the subterranean room reverberated with the raspy coughs of people who had already spent too long in the damp conditions. No one washed for two days and the distinct scent of numerous body odours were becoming more prominent than the damp hanging in the air.

  The far corner of the basement was cordoned off as the communal toilet, consisting only of a large bucket that had not been emptied since they moved down into their shelter. Beside it, a few bottles of bleach were placed as a means of keeping the odours and bacteria to a minimum. Despite their efforts to control the smell, the stink of sixteen people's waste was hard to suppress.

  Water was already in short supply and the food they managed to grab from their stores before Marcus deemed that they had run out of time would not last them long. The people of the house felt prepared for most things, but the prospect of nuclear fall-out had occurred to no one.

  Most spent their time in a slumber, sitting huddled together on what dry patches of ground they could find, staring into space and lost in thought. Others sat together, whispering and discussing what would likely happen. Their eyes always turned to Marcus and Steve in the end, hoping that they had some kind of solution to their predicament.

  The children first saw it as an adventure, camping in the basement, but after the first day of being cooped up and watching their parents’ despair, the novelty wore off, and now they looked on with scared eyes and a feeling of uncertainty. Their giggles and excited voices slowly turned to sighs and whimpers, as they huddled close to their parents for comfort and reassurance.

  "When do you reckon we can go up top?" Gary asked.

  He sat on the floor with his head resting against the mouldy wall of the basement. He looked tired. Dark circles had formed under his eyes and his usually immaculately combed white beard and grey hair, looked dishevelled and unkempt.

  No one answered his question. They all remained silent, staring or drifting in and out of a bored and uncomfortable sleep.

  Gary leaned forward, thrusting his head into the small group of men he was sitting with.

  "Marcus, how long do you think we need to stay down here? We've been here two days, when do you think the fall-out will happen?"

  Marcus looked up when he heard his name being spoken. His eyes were bloodshot and the lids seemed to glow red. He looked just as exhausted as Gary did. His skin was pale and pasty, and the lines in his face seemed deeper than normal.

  "I don't know," he shrugged, blinking his stinging eyes.

  "I thought you soldiers were all trained in this?" Jake said, as he took an interest in the conversation that consisted of the possibility of returning to the surface.

  Marcus looked at him and chuckled. "You're fucking joking, aren't you? I was a Para and we spent all our time avoiding N.B.C training. We hated it and preferred to run about like lunatics with heavy kit, rather than sitting in a hole wearing gasmasks and carrying out contamination tests. The pissing and shitting drills alone were enough to make you want to rip the suit off and take your chances with whatever was floating in the air."

  "What's, 'N.B.C'?" Jake asked.

  Marcus sighed, remembering the discomfort of the training exercises they had endured as recruits.

  "Nuclear, Biological and Chemical warfare; a complete pain in the arse, so, sorry, I haven't a clue about any of it."

  Carl huf
fed and shook his head. "So, what do we do? Just sit here for a year?"

  Marcus looked at him with a grin. "You could always go up there, sit around for an hour, taking deep breaths and drinking the tap water, and if you come down shaking like a shitting dog with your skin falling off, then we will happily stay here."

  Carl had a sudden idea. He sat upright, his eyes flashing with eagerness.

  "What about Stephanie?"

  "What about her?" Marcus shrugged. "Let her rot up there."

  "Exactly," Carl added, "she can be our, uh…what's those things you use to detect radiation? You know, they make that crackling noise."

  "You mean a Geiger counter?" Gary offered.

  "Yeah, that’s it. She could be our Geiger counter. If she is getting sick, then we know the place is contaminated."

  Gary looked across at Marcus and raised an eyebrow. Although the idea sounded a little on the barbaric side to him, it was nevertheless a good idea. Stephanie was already on the surface and had been for a number of days, breathing the air. By default, she was their lab-rat.

  "Okay, who is going to go up there to see how she is?" Gary asked.

  Carl suddenly looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car racing towards it. He sat back, attempting to make himself as small as possible, shrugging his shoulders.

  "Uh, I don’t know. It was just an idea."

  "A pretty good one too," Marcus nodded. "We just need someone to go up there." He glanced about at the small group, then over to the other side of the basement where the others slept. "Alright, I suppose I'll have to do it," he sighed.

  "I'll go up there," a voice suddenly volunteered from the gloom. "I'll do it."

  Lee stepped forward from the shadows, running a grubby hand through his hair and stretching with an air of indifference to the potential risks of radiation poisoning if he was to go up to the surface.

  Marcus shook his head. "Not you, Lee. Even if Stephanie were up there, a picture of health and in high spirits, you'd peel her skin off just for the fun of it. I'll do it."

  "Suit yourself, then," Lee shrugged and turned back to his makeshift bed where Sophie lay asleep. "I was only offering to help."

  "What about Johnny? No one has seen him since we all came down here," Jake said, with genuine concern.

  Over the months, since the incident at the supermarket when they first met, he had grown a great fondness for the scruffy little vagrant.

  "I'll keep an eye out for him, but I'm not going on a wild goose chase. If the place is contaminated, then he's as good as dead."

  "And so are we," Gary added.

  Everyone turned to look at him, startled by his sudden revelation. Gary looked back at each of them and let out a low, almost inaudible laugh.

  "You all don’t really believe that hiding in this cellar will save us, do you?" He looked down into his lap, shaking his head at their ignorance. "If the place really is flooded with radiation, this 'bunker' buys us days, maybe less. I do remember that much from the days of the Cold War. Building a shelter under the stairs from doors and old lumps of wood was an exercise in futility."

  Marcus nodded and the others remained silent, thinking on Gary's words. Marcus knew that Gary was right, but he focussed his attention on seeing for himself what the situation was first.

  Within an hour, Marcus stood ready, covered from head to toe in black plastic bags that had been swathed around his body and head, leaving him looking like something from a cheap horror movie.

  He argued for twenty minutes with Jennifer over being the one to go up top. In the end, he convinced her that he was the only one remotely qualified to do the job, even though he had no idea what he was doing, but as he was a former soldier, it sounded more tangible to the truth.

  "I still don’t want you to go," she said in a final protest. "You’ve done enough around here. Anyone could go up there and check on that fat bitch. It doesn't have to be you, Marcus."

  "I'd rather do it myself, Jen. I need to see how we stand, with my own eyes."

  Jennifer stormed off back to the corner, to where their sons lay sleeping, curled up together on a dirty mattress.

  "Go on then, you be a hero," she grumbled.

  Marcus stared after her, a slight smile creasing his face as he watched his wife stomp away from him. Her strong will and stubbornness were positive features in his eyes.

  "That’s got to be the shittiest gimp-suit I've ever seen, Marcus," Steve joked as he continued to wrap the sticky tape tightly around his brother, sealing the joins of the plastic.

  Gary had constructed a crude respirator from a dust mask and a set of safety goggles that he found in a tool cupboard. Marcus doused a length of towel with water and wrapped it around his face, covering the mask as another form of filtration.

  He walked across to the foot of the steps that led up in to the house.

  "I wish I had a canary or something," he joked as he turned to Steve.

  Beneath the makeshift radiation suit and mask, he was sweating profusely. His body heat was trapped inside the airtight seals, but it was not just because of the temperature. He was scared, too. He remembered enough of his training to know how high doses of radiation affect the human body, and the terrible slow death that can be the result.

  Already, he could feel that his body was saturated in sweat beneath the layers of plastic. It trickled from his head to his toes, coursing along the contours of his muscles in endless streams and gathering in his boots.

  A cold shiver ran the length of his spine as he looked up at the door at the top of the steps.

  "Get up there, check on Stephanie and don’t hang around, bro," Steve said as he made his final checks of Marcus' suit. "Once you’ve confirmed whether she is sick or not, get back down here."

  Marcus stared back at him through the misted lenses of the safety goggles and nodded. His eyes were wide and blinking rapidly. His breathing was heavy, partially from the restrictions of the mask and partially, through fear.

  "Okay, we're good to go," Carl called down from the top of the stairs, as he stood ready by the door leading in to the house.

  Marcus slowly made his way up towards him.

  "Be careful, Marcus," Carl reminded him. "You ready?"

  "Yeah, good to go, mate," Marcus replied, raising his thump. His voice sounded muffled and distant beneath the multiple layers.

  "One…two…three," Carl pulled the door open and Marcus jumped forward and through the gap without any hesitation.

  Carl quickly slammed the door behind him, the draft of it blowing millions of dust particles into the air all around him. His eyes flashed with fear and he forced his face into his hands, holding his breath, he sprinted back down the steps and into the basement.

  "You think he'll be okay?" he asked as he stepped backwards, brushing himself down with his hands and staring back up at the basement door.

  "I fucking hope so," Steve grumbled.

  Marcus paused in the foyer of the house. He could feel the adrenalin coursing through his body, causing his hands and legs to shake slightly. Shafts of light beamed through the large windows of the mansion, capturing tiny specks of dust in their brilliance as they drifted through the air.

  For some reason, he had been expecting the house to look different, in ruin and rotting away under a bombardment of radiation. Instead, it looked no different than it did when they abandoned the surface for the cellar.

  He walked over to the nearest window and peered out into the brilliant sunlight. Even with the layers of plastic, and from behind the mask, the sun's rays had a rejuvenating effect on him. It seemed like years since he felt the glow of the sun on his body.

  Outside, everything seemed normal. The trees, devoid of their leaves, swayed in the winter breeze. The grass was as green as ever, not the tinged yellow he expected to see as it died due to contamination. It danced lazily in the cold wind that swept across the open fields of the park.

  A noise made him look upwards at the clear blue sky. Birds fluttere
d in the air, whistling and squawking as they continued with their daily concerns, oblivious to any radioactive fall-out. They were not dropping from the sky in mid-flight, and from what Marcus could see, the ground was not littered with the corpses of any wildlife.

  He turned away and began to make his way across the large empty foyer, and headed for the storerooms at the back of the house. In the narrow hallway, he paused outside the door that led into the room where they locked Stephanie. He hesitated, leaning his head close to the thick wooden door and listening for any sounds from within.

  For months, the room had acted as her cell with the windows blacked out and in total darkness. She had not stepped foot outside the room or been released from her restraints the whole time; she had been left to exist like an animal in her own filth and squalor. No one had shown any sign of sympathy for her or voiced concern over her treatment. No one objected to the meagre rations given to her, or the conditions that she was forced to live in.

  Six months before, some may have protested against such measures, but the survivors in the mansion changed. They became hardened through struggle, loss, fear, and their survival instincts. Most of all, they became a family, and in their eyes, Stephanie tried to destroy all of that and came very close to succeeding.

  John, the burly man with a gruff voice, a warm and welcoming personality, and amateur lumberjack, was killed during the supply mission to gain more fuel because of Stephanie's sabotage. He was loved by all, and his loss was a blow to the group.

  Simon, a man who none of them knew but had sacrificed his own life to help save those that were trapped inside the supermarket, died from the bites he received and subsequent infection that raged through his body. Though he had not been part of the group, his actions nevertheless, allowed many of them to survive.

  Marcus reached down to the handle. It twisted in his hand and he pushed it open. The hinges creaked, sounding like the stereotypical haunted mansion door as it opened to reveal an impending doom for an unsuspecting victim.