by Billy Farmer
Not knowing what to say, I shrugged my shoulders.
“No one cares what those things are?” He persisted.
He wasn’t going to give it a break. Besides, Sam and I needed to clear the air. “Alright, let’s talk about it.”
Sam was reading off the same queue card as me. “Well, son, it’s pretty damn simple for me. We just up and left Tom, without carin a fuck about it.”
“That wasn’t Tom, Sam. And you know it.”
“We didn’t even try, ‘ough. We just left him ‘ere ta fend for hisself.”
Titouan gave me a look. I shook my head. I then turned to Sam, and in a sullen tone, I said, “I just know that—"
Sam raised both arms and pointed at Titouan and me. “What, you and ‘at little sonofabitch over ‘ere in cahoots with one ‘nother now?”
“Come on. Stop it, man,” I said.
“It’s bullshit, what it is – pure damn bullshit.”
“Sam,” Titouan said.
Oh shit, I thought. Please don’t talk, Titouan. Not now.
He continued in an as controlled and respectful tone as I had ever heard from him. “What Tom did back there… wasn’t normal. Something happened to him. You have to know that. You have, too,” he said, his voice trailing off.
“What Titouan is trying to get at is they ate the woman in the kitchen,” Avery said, with a slight tremble to his voice.
“God,” Tish said, and I seconded.
“I might be an ignorant ass from Eastern Kentucky, but I done know what happened back ‘ere. But ‘at don’t mean I can’t feel like shit for not least tryin.” He tugged a few times at his mustache, refusing to make eye contact with anyone during his moment of contemplation. After several absent tugs, he continued, “I heard the same damn things you’ins did. I lost a friend—we all did back ere-- but if what we all seen and heard was real, and I’m pretty damn sure it was, we all lost a hella lot more ’an ‘at. Things are bad. Real bad.”
***
My legs were freezing. Needing to get some blood circulating, I walked over to the small window that faced the direction of Barrow High School. With the combination of the full moon and the snow mercifully tapering off to just a few flakes here and there, I could see a decent distance up and down the barren street that ran parallel to the maintenance building. “We’ll be able to see where we’re going now.”
“That means those things will be able to see us, too,” Titouan said.
“What do we do, then?” I asked. “We can’t stay in here forever.”
“Wait for the authorities to show up and hope whatever those things were back there don’t find us.”
“Ain’t heard a single siren or nothin ta lead me ta think ‘ere is any authorities. We own our own, fellers,” Sam said.
“Somebody is doing a lot of shooting. Who you think is doing that?”
“Lotta guns in Barrow, Tit.”
Titouan bristled at being called Tit, but remained even tempered, for him anyway. “I think it’s a little too early to say things have gone completely to shit.”
Sam chuckled. “Yeah, ‘em monsters back ‘ere are pretty normal.”
Getting back on point, before Sam and Titouan could further escalate their tensions, I said, “The point is, we can’t defend ourselves. If those Grays come looking to do the same thing they did back there at that house, we’ll be near powerless to stop them. That’s just the truth.”
“Grays, huh?” Sam asked.
I nodded. I wasn’t feeling very imaginative with my naming conventions. They were gray. Why not.
“We’re safe in here for the moment,” Tish said, stone-faced and cold.
I sighed heavily. “If someone wants in that door bad enough, it won’t be much of an issue for him. We have the rifle, but it’ll be of little use if all of them try to get in here.”
Making eye contact this time, and with more vigor, Tish said, “But they’re not here now. We know they’re out there. Why chance it?”
“I say we sleep on it, son. We safe for the time bein.”
“Sleep? How in the fuck are we going to sleep in here?” Titouan said.
“Close our damn eyes. How else,” Sam said, with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“Anyone besides Titouan disagree?” I asked. No one said anything.
There were some tarpaulins on a shelf. We spread them on the floor to lie on. They weren't especially comfortable as bedding goes, but they were better than lying directly on the diesel-soaked and grease-stained floor. Normally stress made me want to sleep, but I was so scared and confused, sleep was the last thing on my mind. It being so cold inside that building only pushed it further away.
They say misery (and self-interest where Titouan was concerned) makes strange bedfellows. It seemed to be true. Instead of sleeping like Sam and Tish, Titouan and Avery were more interested in talking. I drifted in and out of their conversation, spending most of my time glued to the window, and hoping they wouldn’t get into another argument. That was until Avery brought up something that tore me from my indifference. He brought up Titouan’s ghost.
“I did not exactly tell the truth about what I saw on the ice. I did see a person. His coloration was very similar to the woman back at the house.”
Titouan’s eyes got wide and a scowl etched at his face. “You made me look like a complete fool, Avery. Why would you not say anything?”
There was a long pause before Avery finally spoke. "When your nickname is Faux Mulder, no one tends to take what you say very seriously.”
“It makes you wonder what he was doing out there alone,” Titouan said, miraculously devoid of malice, especially given Avery’s admission.
“My guess is, he was not out there alone. Why would he be? They appear to run in packs.”
“Only one attacked Tom,” Titouan said.
In the dim light, I saw Avery’s head turn toward where I stood next to the window. “I believe there were many in that area. William would attest to that.”
Apparently, Avery had heard some of the same strange noises I had. It was quite clear the stigma around his nickname had affected him more than I thought. “There sure seemed to be.”
Something occurred to me. “Jack said he and Tom had heard the sound of a diesel engine near the Patch. The question is why would a truck or whatever it was be out there? If what he said was true, and he had no reason to make it up, this opens up a hell of a lot more questions.”
There were several moments of silence before Avery spoke up. “What if the truck transported some number of Grays out there?”
Titouan countered. “What if the noise of the truck lured them out there? They seem to be drawn to noise.”
Avery nodded. “And smell.”
“Lost delivery guy?” Titouan asked.
“I asked Sam about deliveries. None were due for five days. I doubt very seriously they’d send a truck out in that weather even if one had been scheduled. I don’t think it was that,” I said.
“There are several issues here. None of which we know enough about to speculate,” Avery said.
I almost laughed out loud at the notion of Avery fearing to speculate. “Never stopped you before.”
“If I could come to a logical conclusion about why someone would take those things to the Patch, I would most certainly tell you.”
“I’ll take a stab at it, then,” Titouan said. “If someone brought those things to the Patch, that probably means they have some control over them. If they have control over them, then they probably had something to do with why they are the way they are. There is a military base here in Barrow. Maybe it was an experiment gone wrong. Maybe the military was rounding them up?”
Avery wasn’t convinced. “We are talking about genetic alteration on a grand scale.”
“It’s an Air Force, forward radar base, guys. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be doing experiments like that there,” I said.
“Yeah, and Roswell Airforce Base was only used to teach people h
ow to fly,” Titouan said.
Even in the dim light, I could see Avery’s eyes grow large with surprise and maybe even approval. “One issue with what you said, Titouan. It is Walker Airforce Base. There was no--”
“I thank I done woke up to another nightmare. Like I woke up in a damn cold-ass, stinky fuckin room, filled with three-damned George Norrys. You all might as well go ta sleep. I'll take the watch," Sam said, still lying on his side on the tarp. “’Cause ‘is ol’ boy ain’t goin back ta sleep.”
Of all people, Titouan asked, “What about the Patch?”
“We just got to hope you nerds are wrong and stick with our plan of goin to Miley's," Sam said.
“Miley’s is the plan. It always has been. If he’s not there, we round up whatever vehicles we can find, and we bust ass back to the Patch and get them,” I said.
“And take them where?” Titouan asked.
“All we can take is one step at a time,” I said. “We’re going to be winging a fair amount of this crap, I’m afraid.”
I had just finished my sentence when another round of gunfire erupted. A whole shit load of it, and it was much closer than the previous shots.
“That’s damn close, boys,” Sam said.
There was a brief pause in the gunfire, followed by shouts, in a language none of us understood, from what sounded like a very agitated woman maybe a block away.
Sam and I shared mortified glances before he uttered, “The fuck?”
Thoughts swirled around my mind. Before that, we hadn’t seen or heard a fully functional person since arriving in Barrow. For the briefest of moments, I was hopeful. As unlikely as it seemed, maybe this woman was with Barrow Police or more unlikely the military.
Tish, suddenly aroused from her stupor, got up to look out the window. Someone screaming stopped her in her tracks. I waved her back to her seat. She offered no resistance.
Another round of gunfire erupted again, near Miley’s, followed directly with sounds I couldn’t readily identify. The flood of auditory offerings had bottlenecked my ability to fully process what I was hearing. The abject terror I felt didn’t exactly foster clarity of thinking, either.
Avery muttered one word. “Grays.”
The sound of hundreds of footfalls navigated my bustling auditory system, telling me Avery was right. The materializing silhouettes coming quickly into view completely dashed any remanence of hope I might’ve had. “Shit,” I whispered.
The ghastly procession headed on a crash course that ran parallel with our slapdash shelter. The first couple Grays I saw were good runners. They sped past, without any hesitation. They were on a mission. What came next was a hodgepodge of Grays. Some of them walked relatively normal, while most of them jerked and palsied their way towards the same location the fast runners headed. A couple of the Grays wondered a little too close for comfort but nothing other than a few hard sniffs in our direction came of it.
Relieved but completely exhausted and deflated, I fell hard on my ass. The others whispered fearful utterances. I didn’t need to explain what I saw. They knew. Jesus, I thought. This is bad.
Things quickly got worse. Way worse. Something scraped at the side of the building. The corrugated aluminum siding vibrated against my back, as the object scraped and scratched at it. In concert with the scraping was the sound of feet compacting deep, untrodden snow mixed with the occasional snort.
I struggled to get my breathing right. I closed my eyes and counted, but that did little to assuage my difficulty. Fuck it, I thought. Go out with a fight. I stood and pressed my face hard against the side of the frosted-over window, trying to get a glimpse of what was making the noise. It was like a punch to my gut when I saw it. A Gray, no more than a few feet from the window, scraped the side of the building with a large butcher knife.
For an instant I lost control of my ability to stand. I fell at the speed of gravity, my ass again smacking hard concrete, as the earth came rushing up to meet it. I made way too much noise when my back smacked the wall, followed by my head. I managed to stay conscious, but my breathing was in overdrive. The night went quiet.
***
The moonlight shining in the window cast a shadow, of the menace, directly in front of me. I turned to face the others, their eyes large with fear, their bodies ridged with panic: both that I would die right there of a heart attack, and also because there was a Gray who was smart enough not to be drawn away by the gunfire like the others had. What he wanted was inside the shed.
I heard what I thought was the sound of plastic wrap being crinkled. Then I realized it was the sound of flexing pane of glass above me. The window pane began spider webbing as he applied more and more pressure. There was a brief silence before the window exploded inwards, shards of glass shooting across the inside of the building, and a fair amount falling on me.
He stuck his head in, sniffed, and grunted. Avery whimpered loudly. Sam grabbed his face and pulled it close to his. “Be quiet boy,” he hissed. The Gray snorted hard in Sam and Avery’s direction, slamming something into the side of the building, as he removed his head from inside.
Sam released Avery’s head and slowly moved towards the rifled that leaned against the wall.
I grew dizzy from the rapidity of my shallow pants. I needed to control my breathing.
Once the Gray figured out he couldn’t get in through the window, he began to move away. Momentarily, I thought he had left. He was eerily quiet. The respite of silence ended when the scraping started anew. This time in the eastern side of the building. He was walking around the damn building, I thought.
Titouan panicked. “What do we do? What do we do? What do we do?” He repeated.
“Shut up, damn you,” Sam said, in what couldn’t ever be misconstrued as a whisper.
The scraping sound neared the still locked entrance. With a thud, the Gray threw his weight into it: once, then twice, and finally three times before quitting. Avery began to repeat something under his breath. A prayer, I thought. At least he was whispering during his mental breakdown.
I had managed not to pass out. I was in semi-control of my breathing.
The scraping began again and terminated too damn close to the unlocked door. There was a pause. An incredibly long pause. Then, without warning, the Gray smashed through the door, his momentum making him fall hard against the concrete floor. Damn he was fast. He was on his feet in less than a few seconds and ready to attack.
“Shoot him, dammit,” I said.
Click.
“Oh shit, son,” was all Sam could get out before the Gray was on him.
Sam held the Gray at bay with the gun between them. The Gray snapped his teeth and flailed the knife wildly and, lucky for Sam, inaccurately. Sam grunted as he pitched the Gray to his left. He was free of the attacker, but Avery gained one, thanks to his proximity to Sam during the attack.
Tish fled to the other side of the building, not bothering to help.
I saw Sam try to grab the Gray, but he was stabbed in the leg for his effort. He fell backward in pain. I then tried to help, but the man was too powerful. I ended up on my ass for my effort.
“He is biting me!” Avery screamed. He followed that with cries of being forsaken.
Instantly, I thought about loitering Grays. If they heard him scream, they would soon join in with the one who was already attacking us. We could barely handle him. Shit. I grabbed hold of the Gray as Sam pounded him with the butt of the rifle. The Gray swung the knife wildly, somehow missing everyone, while sinking his teeth into what looked like Avery’s hand. My near stroking out due to hyperventilation for the ten minutes prior had rendered me near useless.
Titouan came up behind the Gray. With Tish’s knife in hand, he stabbed him repeatedly until he fell lifeless on top of Avery. I fell to the side, struggling for every breath. I saw Tish sitting in the corner. “Get over here, Tish,” I yelled between pants.
She was frozen. “Dammit, Tish… we need you… Sam’s cut… and Avery’s bit.”
“That bastard got me good,” Sam said, grimacing with pain and trying to hold pressure on his cut while also taking a look at Avery’s hand.
“Tish!” I yelled.
Titouan was looking in Tish’s bag for something. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Bandages,” he huffed.
He ran the bandage over to me. “Thanks, Titouan,” I said, as I tore off a decent length so I could wrap Avery’s hand. Tish was going to have to work on Sam’s.
I looked over at Sam. “How you doing over there?”
“Bleedin like a stuck pig.”
Tish crouched next to him. About damn time, I thought.
I finished wrapping Avery’s hand. “You okay, bud?”
“Perhaps,” he said, grimacing from the pain.
I didn’t have time to find out what he meant. I patted him on the leg and quickly moved to the opposite side of Tish. “How bad is it?” I asked, as I moved to the door. She didn’t reply.
“He’ll need stitches, but he’ll live,” she finally said.
I nodded.
After the door was refastened, I grabbed one of the tarps we were using as bedding and went about folding it enough times that it was roughly the right size to cover the window, while also making sure it would be opaque enough where light wouldn't shine through it. It would also work as a barrier against the cold wind that was blowing through the hole where the window once was.
I spied some rebar lying on the floor. I leaned a few of the heavy rods against the sides of the tarp to hold it up for a moment. I then ran over to my backpack and grabbed the one thing I was very thankful I brought along: duct tape. I went about using most of the roll to seal the tarp to the wall. I left the rebar in place as an extra precaution because of the high winds. The good news was the window was covered and we could turn our lamps on. The bad news was we no longer had a window to look out.
Avery didn’t look well. He sat with his back against the wall, holding his bandaged hand and staring at the thing lying dead on the floor. “Are you okay?” I asked.
Never taking his eyes off the Gray, he said, “Am I going to turn into that?”
