by Terry Yates
She felt herself sweating a cold, clammy sweat. It was dripping down her forehead and under her arms. She began to slowly walk backwards, the terror completely taking over her body and soul. As she was about to turn and sprint away, she saw the movement again. Something darted out of the corner and then just as quickly disappeared.
Shelly had had enough. She turned and began to blindly sprint down the hallway. As she did so, she thought that she heard a voice…a familiar voice. That was impossible though. There was no one down there. She was about to round the corner into another hallway, when she heard it again.
“Shelly,” it said in hushed raspy tone. “Shelly!”
Shelly froze. There had been no mistaking the voice that time. She’d heard that voice speak her name many times in the last two years. She waited a moment. If she heard it again, she would turn around. She waited, but heard nothing. It was just her imagination. That was it…just her imagination. She took a step forward and then…
“Shelly,” came the voice.
Shelly slowly turned around. There in the darkness, stood a form…and there was no mistaken who it was.
“Marcus?” she asked, barely audible. “Is that you?”
The figure in the dark remained motionless. Whoever it was stood tall and was more than likely African-American. It was the stance that she recognized. She knew the way her Marcus stood.
“Marcus?” she asked again.
“Yes,” answered the voice, still remaining still. “It’s me, Shelly.”
Sheer joy ran through Shelly’s body as she raced for the figure, which stood and waited for her. As she neared him, he opened his arms to await her embrace. Shelly jumped into the figure’s arms and wrapped hers around his neck and her legs around his waist as if she were five years old and he was her father. She looked up into his face and indeed it was Marcus Dixon. As she hugged him, she noticed that he had an odd smell about him. She wasn’t sure what it was and didn’t really care. It just smelled a tad peculiar. No matter, she thought. A shower could get rid of that.
“I knew! I knew it! I knew it!” she screamed while kissing every inch of his face. “I knew you were still alive!”
“Of course you did, Baby,” he said smiling.
Shelly looked into his eyes. His face was still somewhat obscured by the darkness, but she knew that smile when she saw it. Something about him did strike her a little odd, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
Marcus set her down on the floor where Shelly immediately put her arms completely around his waist and put her head to his chest.
“I missed you so much!”
She tightened her grip around him.
“I missed you too, Baby,” he said as he removed her arms from around his waist and smiled down at her.
Shelly took him by the hand and tried to pull him after her.
“Come on!” she said giggling. “Everyone will be so happy to see you. Even Colonel Potts will…”
She stopped speaking when she noticed that he wasn’t following her, but instead, pulling against her.
“What is it?” she asked, moving back to him. “Don’t you want to see everyone? Don’t you want something to eat? Don’t you…”
“Yes. Yes, Baby,” Marcus started, still smiling. “Maybe later. Right now, I want to show you something.”
“Show me something?”
“Yes.”
Shelly could see that he was now grinning ear to ear. He had missed her, too. He cupped his hands to her face and kissed her hard. When he pulled back, he continued to smile.
“I want to show you something,” he said. “Something that will change our lives.”
“Okay, but…I have to tell you about…”
“Later, Baby. Later,” he interrupted. “Come on.”
Marcus took her by the hand and led her to the dark corner where he had appeared from the shadows. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cardkey and placed it between two of the white bricks. Shelly watched as the card disappeared into a crack where he held it until she saw bits of green light glowing against it. She watched as he removed the card, slipped it back into his pocket, and stepped away from the wall. After a moment, part of the wall opened up. The secret door was about her height and not very wide. Whoever went through this door wanted to make sure that it was as small as possible as not to be seen.
“Come on,” the smiling Marcus beckoned, his hand out.
Shelly was hesitant. She couldn’t see anything but darkness beyond the door.
“Don’t worry, Baby,” he said, gesturing with his hand for her to take it.
She knew that after all that they’d been through…all of the looks and glares…all of the jeers…all of the racial epithets…everything that people could throw at a bi-racial couple, he wouldn’t let her down at the eleventh hour. She took his hand and followed him as he ducked through the small doorway and into the darkness.
As she stepped through the door, Shelly could see that they were on a small landing. She looked down to see a stairwell, much like an emergency exit stairwell. There were no lights, which gave the staircase an ominous presence.
“What’s down there?” she asked.
“That’s what I want to show you,” Marcus answered, pulling her down the stairs after him.
Her bare feet told her that the steps were made of cement.
“Slow down, Baby,” she told him.
Wherever they were going, he was in a hurry to get there. They moved quickly down the spiral staircase, Shelly almost falling twice. They ran past floor after floor, where Shelly could see a small door at each landing.
“Slow down, Marcus,” she kept telling him, but he ignored her. She had just given birth three days before. Her breasts were heavy with milk and sore, and her whole pelvic area was hurting.
Just as she was about to tell him that she couldn’t run any farther, he stopped. They must’ve run six floors down the stairwell. She bent over and began to gasp for air.
“Almost there,” he told her, once again taking the cardkey from his pocket, which he slid into another slot. Again, Shelly saw the green glow, immediately followed by the door sliding open.
She followed her husband into a dark room, where as usual, the lights came on as they crossed the threshold, but in this room, the lighting was dim. She could see that the room was large. Several monitors shown around the room, some with security camera pictures on them, and some of them blank, with nothing but white snow flickering across the screen.
“What is this place?” Shelly asked.
“This is some sort of control room. Everything needed for us to survive is down here.”
He began to walk through the room. They walked around desks and consoles as they moved about the large room. To Shelly, it reminded her of the NASA Space Center control room, which is one large room with rows and rows of consoles where men and women sat, each with a different job to do.
“What do you mean…survive?”
Marcus stopped, turned around, and took her by the shoulders. “We can stay down here forever, Shelly,” he said, smiling that smile.
But to Shelly, the smile still looked somewhat strange. She searched his face for a moment, and then discovered it. It was his eyes. Like Opal Munn’s and Samantha Gould’s his irises and pupils had become larger, making his smile look insincere.
“Why would we want to stay down here forever?” she asked, still looking into his face. “We probably should be getting back upstairs. Who knows when the rescuers will be here? We don’t want to get left behind.”
The smile disappeared from Marcus’ face. “We have to stay here, Baby,” he said, his larger than normal eyes staring into hers.
“What do you mean we have to stay here? I know we’ve gotta come back when they rebuild the place, but until then we get to stay in Miami with the rest of your unit.”
“My unit,” he said, turning away from her. “My unit.”
Shelly watched him as he looked at his hands. He tur
ned them over again and again, studying his palms, and then doing the same to the knuckles. It almost looked as if, at that moment, he couldn’t remember who he was.
“Where’ve you been the last two days?” she asked him, trying to get his attention again.
“The last two days?” he asked back over his shoulder.
“Yes, Sweetheart…the last two days. I mean…how did you survive two storms and that…that thing that killed everyone else you were with?”
Shelly watched as her husband searched his memory.
“That thing didn’t kill us all,” he started, looking around the room, still trying to remember the details. “It killed Gunderson, Koontz, King, Bethea, and Albritton.”
“And Aurelio,” Shelly said.
“Martinez? No…not Martinez.”
“Aurelio’s still alive?” Pvt. Aurelio Martinez was Marcus’ best friend. The two of them did everything together. They met in basic training and immediately hit it off, Marcus the serious one, and Aurelio the funny, outgoing one. Aurelio had a Japanese girlfriend, so it was always fun when they went out together. With one Caucasian, one African-American, one Hispanic, and one Asian. Marcus once said that they looked like a walking NATO convention.
“Yes, he’s alive.” Marcus answered.
“How did he get away from it and more importantly how did you get away?”
Her husband turned around and looked at her. “Technically, I didn’t.”
“What do you mean? You and those other guys fought it, didn’t you?
“Yes, we did. I watched it kill most every one of them.”
“But not Aurelio?”
“No…but I heard him screaming and cursing it. I thought for sure it had done to him what it had done to the rest of them. I ran away. Figured if I could make it back to the base, I could at least maybe hide from it. If anything, I would’ve been out of the rain and able to think again.”
“Did you make it back to the base?”
“No,” he answered, slowly shaking his head. “I could hear it howling close to me, and I knew that thing could run fast and move quickly…damn, could it move! At that point, I knew I couldn’t outrun it, so I just dove for cover and pulled a piece of tin over me. The wind was trying to pull if off of me, but I held on, God did I hang on to that sheet of tin. The sheet metal was cutting my fingers so badly, that I wanted to just let go of it and take my chances. But I didn’t have to wait…because it found me. That big bastard tracked me down like I was a rabbit that it had been stalking.”
Shelly wasn’t sure that she wanted to hear any more. He was alive and well and that was all that mattered. She didn’t have to know how he got away. He just did.
“Baby,” she started, but Marcus raised his hand.
“No…listen,” he said, his hand still raised. “The thing reached down and picked me up by my shoulders like I was a five year old. It pulled me close, its nose almost touching my nose. I could smell its breath, I could see pieces of flesh and bone between its teeth…and its eyes…its eyes were fiery yellow, and they glowed in the dark.”
“I know. I’ve seen them,” Shelly told him, remembering when she had seen the burn victim change.
“It looked at me for the longest time,” Marcus continued, as if he had not heard her. “It had the strangest look on its face. It was almost as if it were smiling. It was going to eat me. I could see it! I could feel it! I just knew it! And then it opened its mouth and I saw those sharp teeth up close. I tell you, Baby, I’m surprised that I didn’t shit my pants right then and there. They were humongous. I mean really big. Huge! And it sank those teeth right into my throat. All I could think of was you and Oliver and Kayla, and I wondered how you were going to get along without me. No shit, that’s exactly what I was thinking while that creature was trying to rip my throat out. Isn’t that crazy?”
Shelly didn’t think so at all. She still had to tell him about Oliver, but she would wait until he was through with his story.
“What happened?” she asked.
Before he got too far in me, something…I’m not sure what, but it was heavy and it hit it in the back of the head, knocking us both down. It laid still on top of me. I thought it was dead, so I rolled it off of me and tried to run away, but either the wound or the shock itself, gave me spaghetti legs, and I kept falling down. I kept waiting for it to get up and attack me again, but it never did. Once I managed to get to my feet, I was able to see that it was out cold…I mean stone gone. I knew it wasn’t dead, because its stomach kept moving up and down.”
Now Shelly understood why the stranger had no memory. It had been knocked out of him by whatever had hit him.
“I was bleeding badly,” he continued. “But instead of going to the base, I tried to get to the hospital. I knew that everyone that was left, including that doctor, was there.”
“But you didn’t make it.”
“No. I got lost, what with the hurricane blowing me sideways, plus the loss of blood. I completely lost my bearings and I ended up here. I rang and rang the buzzer, but no one came. I shouted until I just became too weak to go on. I figured that everyone had abandoned the place, so I just sat down outside the door and waited to die. I had fitful dreams all night. I kept dreaming that I was someone else or I was dreaming someone else’s dream. Nothing made sense at that point. I remember being awakened by the wind and the rain and someone nudging me with their boot.”
“There was someone inside the building?” she asked, surprised.
“Yes. He was dressed in one of these outfits. He had a cap and sunglasses and an AK-47 hanging from his shoulder.
“Was he a soldier?” Shelly asked, just now noticing that Marcus was wearing a one-piece blue uniform.
“Not one that I recognized. As far as I know, the army doesn’t have these kind of uniforms. I asked him to help me, but he just looked down at me. I swear I saw him looking at my neck. I remember reaching up and touching it. The wound was caked with blood…so were my fatigues, but the wound itself didn’t feel as bad as I expected it to. The skin wasn’t as torn as I had remembered.”
“What did the man do?” Shelly asked him, becoming more entranced with the story of her husband’s survival.
“Because of the sunglasses, I couldn’t see his eyes, but the rest of his face was expressionless. He looked down at me like I was a wounded animal that he’d just found. I saw him shake his head and then lift his rifle. The bastard was going to shoot me! I’d escaped the monster AND the hurricane, and this son-of-a-bitch was going to kill me…for no reason! Before I knew it, I had kicked his legs out from under him, got on top of him and…”
Marcus stopped talking. Shelly watched as he swallowed hard, recollecting the moment.
“And what?” she asked.
“I pummeled him with my fists. I had such a rage inside me. I couldn’t control it. I just beat him and beat him until his face was nothing but jelly and then I beat him some more. He didn’t show me any compassion, so I didn’t show him any. None.”
“That’s not like you, Baby,” Shelly told him. “You’ve always been kindhearted. That’s what made me fall in love with you.”
“Well, I wasn’t then. All I wanted to do was take the last six hours of my life out on this man’s face. He tried to kill me when I needed help! I wouldn’t have done that!”
He began to pace back and forth like a wild animal, his fists clenched as if the fury of that moment had been rekindled during its retelling. Shelly put her hand on his shoulder. He flinched for a moment as if he’d forgotten that she was there.”
“Go on, Baby.” She’d gone this far. She had to hear the end of the tale.
“Well,” Marcus sighed, “Just about the time I was settling down, I heard noises coming from inside the building, so I took the man’s rifle and went through his pockets. He had no I.D. or anything, just this.”
Marcus pulled the cardkey from his pocket. For the first time, Shelly got a good look at the card. She had seen Locklear O’Hearley’s,
but not close up. It was solid white, but blank. There was no writing on it or slide strips, or anything to keep it from just looking like a credit card sized blank piece of plastic. She also saw that there was blood on it. Marcus noticed this and put it back into his pocket.
“I ran away and hid in what was left of the woods. After a few minutes, the outside doors opened and I saw five or six men who were dressed exactly like he was, come outside with their AK’s out and loaded for bear. I watched them as they pulled the man’s body back inside. I half expected them to come looking for me…I mean…I would’ve if someone had just beaten one of my friend’s to death, but they just went back inside and closed the doors behind them.”
“How did you get in the building?
“I waited till nightfall, and then disabled what cameras I could reach. They teach you a lot in the modern army. I used the card and the doors opened. I got inside fully expecting them to be waiting for me, but they weren’t anywhere to be seen. Even though it was dark, I somehow knew that they weren’t around. My instincts told me, I guess. I walked through the place, rifle out, ready to shoot anyone or anything that came at me. I was fumbling around in the dark for several minutes when I came to an elevator. Once again, I pulled out the card to see if it had any magic left in it…and it did. I slipped into the keypad and waited. I thought that I would have to punch in a number or something, but I didn’t, or I thought that I didn’t, because a few seconds later, I heard the elevator moving. It was coming from down below. I waited for what seemed like hours, but it was probably only a few seconds. When I knew that it was at the first floor, I waited for the doors to open. When they did, I came face to face with a woman dressed exactly like the men I had seen. The uniform, the cap, the sunglasses, everything. I could tell that she was as surprised as I was, so I rushed straight at her, picked her up off of the ground and snapped her neck as if it were the easiest thing that I’d ever done. It couldn’t have taken more than five seconds.”
Shelly was taken aback by this part of the story. She could never imagine her husband killing a woman even if he was protecting himself. It wasn’t in his nature. He might’ve knocked her cold, or put her in one of the dozen sleeper holds that he knew, but not just flat out snap her neck like she was a rag doll.
