The din grew at a frightening rate. They all looked around, speechless, unsure what to do — even Barbra absorbed that some critical conversion had taken place, and though she said nothing to the others, she did, in fact, think back to that first dead man’s picking up the rock and breaking through Johnny’s car window.
Barbra’s recollection was almost prophetic — right on its heels, the dead man who had started the current ruckus by picking up the rock got close enough to a window to pitch his burden through the glass. The stone not only shattered the bottom window panes, it knocked some of Ben’s handiwork askew, jarring the lumber loose on its nails.
Ben raced forward, holding the rifle crossways against the planks of wood as the thing outside followed up on its assault. Another joined it, and Ben struggled to keep the barricade in place.
Harry Cooper watched from across the room, licking his lips in excitement in spite of his fear. If the bastard happened to lose his grip, to drop that gun ...
Helen Cooper, on the other hand, was thinking of survival in a different light. She had leaned against the front door, to support the barricade there, but the pounding kicked up a notch, and the whole structure began to tremble and shake. Gasping, she turned toward it, trying to place her hands in the best positions possible, to brace the door wherever she could. She didn’t know exactly why Ben had to break the lock to get back into the house earlier, but she suspected Harry had something to do with it, and now she cursed her husband for his shortsightedness!
Ben could see the dead people staring at him through the gaps in the barricade. All through the evening, they had rarely seemed aware of his looking out through the windows, but they were now. Their eyes widened and their teeth gnashed as they practically drooled over the sight of him. It reminded him of a wasp he’d seen outside his bedroom window as a child — young Ben had placed his hand against the glass where the insect was bumping around, and it kept attacking the pane on the other side of his fingers, trying to sting him, repeatedly, even though he was beyond its reach.
The big difference here was, Ben wasn’t sure how much longer he would remain beyond the dead’s reach. Their hands snaked through the broken panes, heedless of the jagged glass which tore deep trenches into their graying flesh. Ben twisted away from those grasping hands while still trying to brace the barricade as best he could — it was a dance he would not be able to keep up for much longer.
Helen saw his dilemma from her own struggle at the front door, but she could do nothing to help him without abandoning her post. She sympathized with his plight — God, if one of those things laid a hand on her ...
Where the hell was HARRY?!
She glanced over her shoulder to see her idiot husband just standing there across the room. What was wrong with him?! Couldn’t he see they needed help?!
Ben was wondering the same thing. He twisted around and yelled, "Get over here, man!"
Cooper still hesitated.
"Come on!" Ben bellowed. And the distraction cost him.
Too many hands — Ben hadn’t heard it, but the upper panes must have broken or been ripped loose, too, because now the dead were reaching through the boards at all points of the window. One of the diagonal boards bulged outward in spite of his weight and the nails, and threatened to tear loose altogether. He couldn’t manage this with only one free hand anymore and he couldn’t shoot at them under these circumstances, so he dropped the rifle to the floor beside him.
Harry’s eyes lit up when the gun tumbled to the rug. Yes! But ... could he get to it without Ben realizing what he was up to? He had no desire for another beating.
Helen saw it happen, too, and turned her back to the door once again, watching her husband. Were his priorities so distorted? God knew Harry was a flawed man and husband, but was he that blind?
Harry watched Ben carefully, watched him in his pointless struggle as exactly what he had predicted happened before their eyes — all these flimsy boards would never keep those things out. But the man was so spiteful, so determined not to admit that Harry had been right all along, that he just wouldn’t let it go and retreat to the cellar. Ben didn’t deserve that gun, he didn’t deserve to be in charge — Harry did!
Harry crept forward.
Helen saw it, knew what he was doing. She wanted to call out to Ben, to warn him, but there was so much noise and the door was still shaking and she knew that Harry did love Karen even if he didn’t love her anymore and ... and so she froze.
Harry dove forward and snatched the rifle up from the floor. The gun was his!
Ben, still in full-pitched battle to keep the dead from breaking into the house, gaped at Cooper in dumbstruck awe. He had known that the man was an opportunistic asshole, had had the point driven home when he’d left Ben outside to die, but ... now, of all times? Now? Could anyone be that nearsighted, that stupid?!
Cooper, hunched over like a little troll, cocked the rifle as he backed away. "Go ahead! Go ahead!" the man blathered. "You wanna stay up here now?!" He pointed at his wife, then over his shoulder. "Helen, get in the cellar."
Ben tried to watch Cooper, but he couldn’t dismiss the window. If he let go for one second, the dead might get in!
Helen also remained at her post, her back pressed to the barricade of the front door. She glanced at Ben, then looked back at Harry ... and shook her head.
"Get in the cellar now!" Cooper yelled at her. And whether he was conscious of it or not, he pointed the rifle right at his wife as he demanded, "Move!"
But it was Ben who moved.
Pulling the diagonal board from the window — it had been knocked completely loose by this point, anyway — Ben hurled the wooden plank at Cooper with all his might. The board struck the rifle across the barrel before flipping onto the sofa, knocking the gun down toward the floor (and saving Helen Cooper’s life) as it discharged, the bullet slamming harmlessly into the rug.
Ben lunged at Cooper, knowing it was down to the wire — whatever might happen with the dead, he wouldn’t live if Cooper held onto that gun.
They struggled, each with two hands on the rifle, each twisting it back and forth in an effort to shake the other loose. Cooper bared his teeth in a vicious snarl, the gleam in his eyes little better than those things outside.
Helen watched, watched her husband devolve before her. It was difficult to see in the gloomy house, but she could see enough to know that — no matter who won the fight — she would not be joining her husband in the cellar. She would carry her sick daughter up into the attic if she had to, but she would never lock herself in a room with Harry Cooper, would never turn her back on him ever again.
In the end, size, youth, and fitness won out, and Ben knocked Cooper to the floor with the butt of the rifle as he yanked it free. He turned the weapon around, cocking it and taking aim.
Cooper gazed wide-eyed up at Ben.
Helen, trembling, watched from the front door. Watched, and tried not to think about what she wanted to happen next, what she wanted Ben to do.
Ben hesitated for a moment as Cooper used the wall behind him to stand up, his hands open and pleading for mercy ... but only for a moment. Things had gone too far, the man had committed too many crimes to ignore. Beating him before had achieved nothing — if Ben let him live, it would only be a matter of time before he regretted it.
He would do what had to be done.
And so the civilized high school teacher tightened his grip on the rifle and shot the salesman.
The bullet hit Cooper in the left side of his gut — Cooper grasped at the wound, stumbled forward against the old piano near the cellar door, then slumped to the floor.
Ben stared down at the man as smoke drifted from the barrel of the gun. He knew he should feel something — regret at least, if not horror at what he had just done.
But he felt nothing. Nothing at all.
Then Helen screamed. Not over seeing her husband shot, but because the front door was actually beginning to splinter, the wood caving in unde
r the pounding of rocks and fists and God knew what else.
Ben looked behind him and saw that the window he had left unattended was in danger of full collapse as well. He afforded Cooper one more glance, then turned away and rushed back to his own station.
The upper-left portion of the front door gave way, and Helen cried out as cold, dry hands reached through and grabbed at her right shoulder. She swatted at the hands, knocking them aside and pulling them away, but for every inch she gained, she lost two — they were pulling at her clothes, tangling into her hair!
Barbra watched from the sofa, then covered her eyes. It was so much like the man in the cemetery, pawing at her, biting at her, wheezing that horrid breath against her face — she couldn’t stand it! She turned away from Helen ...
... and saw that Cooper was getting to his feet!
At first she thought that he had turned, that he was one of them! But instead of moving toward her, of reaching out and snapping his teeth at her, he shoved himself up along the piano and staggered away from the others, back into the open cellar doorway.
Harry Cooper was indeed still alive, but he knew he wouldn’t be for much longer. The pain in his gut where the son of a bitch had shot — shot him! — was so intense, he couldn’t give it proper expression ... and yet, at the same time, he found himself strangely numb all over.
All he could focus on, all he could think of, was to get to the one person who hadn’t betrayed him this night — to get to Karen, his sweet baby girl.
Falling back through the cellar doorway, Harry forced himself to climb down the stairs. It was a clumsy affair, with none of his limbs knowing quite what to do anymore; his feet dragged over each step as his legs pumped forward, and it was nothing short of a miracle that he didn’t tumble head-over-heels all the way to the bottom. By the time he reached the cellar floor, clinging to the wall for support, his vision was blurring and his breath was rasping in his throat. In the back of his mind, he noted that there was too much light down here, that with the power out it should have been like descending into a mine shaft ... but that would have meant that Ben was right, that some of the fuses had blown rather than the power lines going down as a whole, and even with his dying breaths, Harry Cooper didn’t want to admit to being wrong, especially to Ben, so he dismissed it.
None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was getting to Karen.
He ran a sweaty hand over his face, squeezed his eyes shut, then reopened them. When his vision refused to improve, he lurched onward anyway. He teetered from side to side, rocking wildly but somehow managing to stay on his feet. He made it almost all the way to his daughter’s cot before collapsing onto his right knee, then forward onto his right hand, the wrist creaking in protest without his feeling it.
He reached out with his left hand, toward Karen, toward his little girl ...
... and then the concrete floor rushed up to meet him. He thought his fingertips brushed Karen’s shirt as he fell, but his hands had grown so numb, he couldn’t be sure.
Harry Cooper’s final thoughts were, I was right all along. It is dark as a tomb down here after all. I was right! I was right ...
The world was growing dark for Helen Cooper as well. The more those things destroyed the barricades and broke through the windows and door, the more moonlight was leaking into the house, but all of that was overwhelmed by the dead hand that had found its way around her throat, cutting off her air. She clutched at it and tried to pull it away, but she could only catch the faintest snatches of breath — she was seconds from blacking out if Ben didn’t come help her, but as her eyes rolled to the side, she saw that he was fighting his own losing battle; no aide would be coming from Ben, not in time.
In the end, it was Barbra who came to her rescue.
Still sitting on the sofa, her hands covering her face, Barbra was peeking through her fingers like a teenage girl at a horror film who, in spite of her fear, still wants to know what’s coming next. And as she watched Helen’s struggle, watched the door collapsing and falling away in pieces behind the woman, her eyes widened in disbelief.
Reaching through the widening gap at the top of the door was the man from the cemetery, the creature who — as far as Barbra was concerned — started this whole nightmare by attacking her and hurting Johnny!
For the first time in hours, Barbra came alive.
Snatching up the board Ben had used to knock aside the rifle in Cooper’s hands, Barbra clenched her teeth and rushed across the room, centering her sights on the hand that was choking Helen to death. With her whole body weight behind it, Barbra slammed the board against the dead man’s forearm so hard that, even over the growing noise, she heard one of the bones snap! The hand spasmed open, and Helen gasped a deep breath before falling away from the door.
Then all those hands flailed toward their new victim — Barbra.
She screamed as they grabbed at her, but not just from distress. Pent-up anger flowed from her, anger which had been percolating deep within her gut even as her mind had strove for denial and withdrawal. She cried out as the hands pulled at her hair, at her clothes, but she made no effort to pull away — she fought them, fought to keep the barricade intact, to keep the house safe.
She knew it was probably a lost cause, but the important part was that she fought!
Helen Cooper knew she should return the favor and help Barbra, but as soon as she realized that Harry was no longer where he had fallen, her heart clenched with a very different kind of panic — Karen!
Sailing down the basement stairs so fast her feet were a blur, Helen called out, "Karen?!"
She found the same patches of light as Harry, but she paid no mind to that mystery; nor did she give another thought to returning to help Ben and Barbra upstairs — in fact, in that moment, she forgot that Ben or Barbra existed.
For unlike Harry, Helen did not find her sick little girl passed out under her borrowed sheets. She found Karen up and about, kneeling before the body of her father ...
... and eating his arm.
"Karen?" she whispered.
Karen’s eyes rolled toward her mother, and the hunk of meat from her father’s shoulder fell to the floor. She moved around on her knees and, with some tottering, climbed to her feet.
"Karen ..." Helen said again, her voice taking on a pleading tone. She moved to the side, desperate to unsee what she was seeing.
Karen moved toward her, her arms outstretched as if seeking a hug. But the hunger in her young eyes and the gore covering her mouth told another story.
"Poor baby," Helen choked, tears filling her eyes ... but she still backed away.
Karen advanced, showing no emotion beyond that need, that monstrous hunger.
"Baby ..." she said again. Then her foot caught against something, and she stumbled and fell.
As soon as she hit the floor, striking her head on the corner of something wooden and unyielding, Helen’s confusion sharpened into focus. What she was seeing was terrible, but she was no longer in denial of it.
As if to illustrate that point, Karen reached out and grabbed a dirty old trowel from the wall. Whatever had taken those things upstairs so long to figure out tools, Karen was apparently not experiencing the same delay — she grasped the little shovel’s handle in both hands and raised it high above her head, ready to strike, as she again advanced upon her mother.
Helen wanted to get up, to run away, but her body was in revolt. Instead she cowered, unable even to form words to beg for mercy, for her daughter to stop this.
Helen was unable to speak, but she found she could still scream. She screamed as Karen stood over her and brought the trowel down, plunging the grimy metal into her chest. She screamed as Karen withdrew the tool and struck again, and again, and again, splattering Helen’s blood across her face and onto the walls and all over Karen’s dress which Helen had made for her last Easter. She screamed until she could scream no more ...
... and still Karen brought the trowel down again, and again, and ag
ain.
Upstairs, Ben and Barbra were not fairing a great deal better. The dead were swarming over the front of the house, threatening to crash their way in through sheer weight of numbers. To make matters worse, the gaps in the window were now sufficient enough that Ben was in serious danger of getting bitten, forcing him to fall back, literally, so that he could regroup and approach the window from a safer angle. At least the window started at waist-height — if Ben failed here, those uncoordinated things would still have some difficulty getting through it more than one at a time. But if they lost the barricade at the front door ...
Night of the Living Dead Page 17
