by Sam Sisavath
“Did they communicate somehow?” Keo asked.
“Not that I heard.”
“Maybe whispered?”
“The walls are too thick for whispering,” Levy said. He looked from one door to the other and back again. His friends were in there. Keo didn’t pretend to know what it was like for him at the moment.
“What now?” Gillian asked. “What do we do with them?”
“They want to come out,” Keo said. “So we’ll let them come out.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Not at all,” Keo said, and looked over his shoulder at the open window across the living room. “We’ll need to close that up first.”
“You really think it’ll fall for it?” Norris said doubtfully.
“I don’t think they’re that smart.” He looked back at the door, moving against Bowe’s and Earl’s fists. “I think once they turn, they’re stuck operating on very primitive base instincts. And right now, they want to come out and feed. So let’s give them both.”
*
Keo had an idea of how to do it, but it all depended on whether Earl, Gavin, and Bowe would cooperate. They decided to set their sights on the first room, the one with Earl and Bowe inside because it was closer, though Keo had a moment of doubt. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to deal with two of them at the same time. What if it all went sideways? They had barely survived Earl, and now they were going to risk it with Earl and Bowe?
To hell with it. Two for the price of one. Now that’s daebak.
“Go,” Keo said.
Norris slipped the key into the padlock over Gavin’s door, but didn’t turn it right away. Instead, he looked back at Keo, then over his shoulder at Levy. “We really going to do this?”
“Yeah,” Keo said.
“You answered kind of fast there.”
“It’ll work.”
The ex-cop sighed. “Easy for you to say. You’re over there and I’m over here.”
“Hey, you lost the coin toss.”
“Dammit,” Norris said, and returned his focus to the door in front of him.
Rachel and the kids were outside the house, but Gillian had insisted on staying behind. She watched from the living room with Levy, standing partially in shadows because they had closed the front door and all the windows back up, which gave the house a dark, cave-like feel. She looked tense, and he guessed she was having second thoughts about being in here at the moment.
“Do it,” Keo said.
“Yeah, yeah, hold your horses,” Norris grunted back.
Norris took another deep breath, then turned the key in the padlock and tugged it out of the loop and stepped back almost in the same motion.
The door remained closed, Earl and Bowe having given up banging on it a few minutes ago, almost as if they could sense (Could they?) what was about to happen outside. Norris backpedaled out of the hallway, not stopping until he was inside the living room with Gillian and Levy, who was clutching his AR-15 in front of him.
Keo remained where he was, partially hidden in the shadows next to the window that faced the left side hallway. He waited, but Gavin’s door remained closed. He listened for sounds of movement but could only hear Norris’s accelerated breathing across the room, and maybe Levy’s and Gillian’s, too.
“They’re not coming out,” Norris said. He was at an angle where he could look into the hallway and see the door.
“Give them time,” Keo said.
“How much time?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve done this before.”
“Oh, now you tell me.”
“If you’re so impatient, why don’t you go over there and open the door for them? Invite them out.”
Norris seemed to actually think about it. “Maybe I should.”
“Go on. I’ll wait.”
“I got a better idea,” Norris said. “Let’s flip for it again. Heads I go, tails you—”
Click! as the door opened.
Norris took another (involuntary) step back and clutched his M4. Gillian might have gasped out loud, while Levy stood perfectly still, as if he were rooted to the floorboards and couldn’t move even if he wanted to.
“One of them’s coming out,” Norris said.
Keo didn’t have to move to see into the hallway from his spot, but it also gave him a very limited angle on the walls themselves. He couldn’t tell if Earl’s room was open since the door swung inward. So he waited and listened, but mostly he kept tabs on Norris, who had the better view.
“Any day now,” Norris said.
They didn’t have to wait too much longer before long, blackened fingers slipped out of the open door and grasped one side of the doorframe. The bony fingers dug in, taking a firm hold, before Earl’s head appeared in the hallway and tilted, black sockets and tiny slits where eyes used to be searching them out. His black flesh looked at home in the shadows, while sharp bones underneath tight skin moved at unnatural angles.
Then a second creature appeared in the doorway.
Bowe.
The sight of two of them, sticking their heads out of the open door, so far and yet so close that he could smell them—like rotting cabbage—made Keo rethink everything. Because this was a stupid plan that depended on too many factors to work. All it would take was one mistake and they would all die. God knew they couldn’t shoot the damn things.
Two pairs of black eyes rested on Norris, who stood the closest to them. Gillian and Levy, standing slightly behind Norris, both took an involuntary step further back. Keo didn’t think they even knew what they were doing when they did it. It was human nature to back away from overt danger. It was difficult to look at the two shriveled, unnatural things that used to be Earl and Bowe and not see death.
Living, breathing, moving death.
Norris seemed undeterred. Or maybe he was just putting up a really good front. Either way, he didn’t move from his spot and instead gritted his teeth back at the monsters eyeing him. “Come on out, you ugly sonofabitches. What are you waiting for?”
The creatures bared their teeth at him. Ugly teeth. Cracked, stained teeth. How the hell had they gotten so bad so fast? It was as if acid had chewed on them, turned them into jagged sticks jutting out from gooey, bleeding gums.
“Come on,” Norris said. “Come get me, you sonofa—” He didn’t get to finish because the creatures bounded out of the room and made a straight line for him.
They were fast. So fast.
Keo didn’t realize how fast they really were until he saw two of them moving side by side. He imagined cheetahs stalking prey on the plains.
And Norris was that prey, even as he stumbled back and shouted, “Now, kid, now!”
Norris was backing up so fast that he tripped over his own feet and fell down on his ass.
Just like Bowe did last night…
Keo pulled back on the chains that kept the wooden plate over the window next to him. It wasn’t exactly like jerking on a regular window curtain, because the damn thing weighed a ton. The barricade was halfway up, streaks of sunlight pouring in instantly, when the creatures were halfway to Norris. They might have actually made it if they had kept going, but the sudden brightness must have surprised them, and they stopped and their heads snapped in his direction almost in unison.
A splash of morning flashed across the room and hit Earl’s legs first because he was closest, and the creature let out a loud squeal as both bent legs turned ash white, the flesh becoming instantaneously brittle against direct contact with sunlight.
The creature that used to be Bowe turned and fled back into the hallway.
Keo kept pulling and the wooden plate kept rising, until a large swath of the living room was flooded with sunlight. Bowe, halfway back to the hallway, seemed to freeze in place and let out a pained noise. It might have even screamed if it had gotten the chance.
But it didn’t. Neither one of them did.
Their faces turned white, then gray, then brittle along with their torso and arms a
nd they fell apart as if their entire being had come unglued. Flesh and muscle and organs evaporated in a puff of black-gray clouds, the exposed skeletal remains crumpling to the faux wooden floors in separate piles not far away from one another.
Norris scrambled back up to his feet, brushing at ash that had fallen over his pants. He coughed and so did Keo, the acidic stench of the creatures stinging his nostrils and eyes.
Levy and Gillian walked over, holding rags to their mouths and noses, and stood over the bony remains of the two creatures. They swiped at the lingering cloud and stared down wordlessly at what used to be Earl and Bowe.
“Damn, it worked,” Norris said.
“Told you,” Keo said.
“Right. You told me. I saw you almost peeing in your pants over there.”
Keo grinned back.
Norris crouched next to Earl’s bones and took out a hunting knife from a sheath. He jammed the blade into a part of the ribcage and pried something loose, then tossed it to Keo. “Souvenir,” Norris said.
“What is it?” Gillian asked, her voice muffled by the rag over her mouth.
“One of the 9mm bullets from last night,” Keo said. “It must have gotten lodged in Earl’s ribcage when I shot him.”
Norris straightened up and put his knife away, looking down the hallway at Levy’s room. “Two down, one to go…”
*
It was harder with Gavin. The fact that he (it) didn’t come out of the room right away when Norris unlocked it wasn’t a surprise. Earl and Bowe hadn’t, either. But after an hour of waiting and he still hadn’t come out, Keo considered the very real possibility that the creature knew, somehow, what had happened to Earl and Bowe.
Curiouser and curiouser…
Eventually, they were able to lure Gavin out using Norris as bait once again. He stood outside the open door for five minutes, just waiting for Gavin to make his move.
“Come on, you stupid sonofabitch!” Norris shouted into the door. “I can you see in there. Come on out! You know you want this! Prime American beef here, asshole!”
That did it.
Norris practically dived out of the hallway, screaming, “Do it do it do it!” as Gavin lunged out of the open door after him.
Keo yanked the chains for the second time and sunlight flooded the hallway and caught Gavin in the narrow passage. Like with Earl and Bowe an hour earlier, Gavin attempted to flee back into the room, but sunlight splashed across its back and the creature turned to ash. A cloud of remains appeared out of thin air, then the clatter of bones crumpling to the floor.
Norris gave Keo a suspicious look across the room as he picked himself up from the floor. “You waited a little long that time, kid. It almost had me.”
“You’re imagining things,” Keo said, grinning back at him.
*
They buried Gavin’s bones in the woods next to Earl’s and Bowe’s, using shovels from the shack. Keo and Norris dug the graves and settled the remains into the holes, while Levy stayed back at the house with Gillian and the girls to clean out the two rooms.
Gavin’s room was covered in sticky dry blood and bullet holes, but Levy’s required less work. In truth, Gillian and Rachel were probably doing most of the work back at the house. Everyone had agreed without actually saying anything that Levy should do as little as possible. The guy had already lost too much. Asking him to clean up after his friends would have been cruel.
When they were finished, Keo and Norris stood over the graves—small bumps in the earth that would, in a year or so, be consumed by the rest of the woods—and sucked in the morning air. He hadn’t realized the true meaning of fresh air until he had spent two hours inside a closed house with the dead remains of three bloodsuckers.
“We can do it,” Norris said after a while.
“What’s that?”
“Stay here.” Norris glanced around at their peaceful surroundings. “The house, the generator, the supplies in the basement, and the fish in the river out back. We could stay here indefinitely. Or at least until things get back to normal.”
“You still think things will get back to normal, old timer?”
“Everyone needs hope, kid. It’s a big planet. I can’t believe everyone’s gone except for us.”
“We know for a fact not everyone’s gone. The gas station, remember?”
Norris grunted. “I remember every time I see the Durango. You think they’re around here somewhere? Maybe even looking for us still?”
“I don’t know,” Keo said. “That’s the problem. I wish I knew, and I don’t.”
Who the hell were those guys?
A pair of hummingbirds flickered across the sky above him, drawing Keo’s attention. Somehow, knowing the birds were still around gave him some level of comfort. If they could survive the end of the world…
“Let’s head back,” Keo said. “I’m hungry.”
“That junk food isn’t going to last long,” Norris said. “We might as well eat as much as we can now. Pig out, get fat, die of high blood pressure and diabetes. Wouldn’t that be something?”
Keo chuckled. “Yeah. Old-fashioned natural death, huh?”
“That’s the dream, kid,” Norris grinned back.
As they walked through the woods back toward the house, Keo found himself stealing a glance around them, listening for sounds of movement other than their own. He didn’t hear anything, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something (someone) out there.
Who the hell were those guys?
PART THREE
‡
SUMMERLAND
CHAPTER 22
Life went on after Earl, Bowe, and Gavin—at least for Keo and the others. They had gotten to know the three men somewhat, but there wasn’t the same familiarity that Levy had. Keo personally liked them enough, especially the older Earl, but it was hard for him to think of Bowe and Gavin as more than just a couple of country kids he met briefly before they left, never to be seen again.
It was different for Levy, of course, but the young man surprised Keo by, if not getting over his loss, then rising above it. He hadn’t expected that kind of resilience from the kid, but then, Keo accepted the possibility that he might have misjudged him. A day was hardly enough to get to know someone, especially considering all the emotions that Levy had been forced to endure in just twenty-four hours.
The only remaining survivor of Earl’s group showed them the surrounding area in the beginning, pointing out the danger spots they had stumbled across in the first few days while scavenging for supplies. After that, Levy spent most of his time hunting in the woods, coming back with the occasional bird or squirrel, but even those were getting harder to find. It wasn’t just the land-based animals that were disappearing, as it turned out.
They raided as many houses around the area they were comfortable with, but for every house they entered, they left alone two. Sunlight was their friend, but sunlight could only go so far into a house even after they knocked down all the doors and windows. Most of the time they steered clear of the bigger homes. The creatures, they found, tended to congregate in large areas. Two-story houses were usually filled with them, especially on the second floor.
The stores were equally dangerous, and they spent most of their time looking through the front lobbies, grabbing all the impulse buys along the cash registers. Clothing was plentiful, and by the end of the first week they had enough of a wardrobe to last for years, negating further need for the girls to raid Rachel’s luggage. After that, they concentrated on emergency supplies—non-perishables, canned goods, and batteries. They grabbed anything they thought they could use, either now or later. The basement back at the house filled up quickly as a result.
In the back of his mind, Keo knew the reason he and Norris kept going out wasn’t because they needed supplies. They had plenty, and although you could never have too much these days, they weren’t the type comfortable with sitting around the house. Even after he retired, Norris was restless, which had resulted in his c
ross-country road trip. Keo had never thought about what he would do past his thirtieth birthday. The fact that he was still alive, with a year still to go, was a miracle.
Each time they went out, they had to go further from the house, and Keo was always wary of going too far north, which would lead them back to the interstate. So they went south instead, sometimes extending east and west, but staying mostly off the main highway that connected to Corden nearby. The smaller the roads and more isolated the homes, he found, yielded the best opportunities. Like with the cabin back at the RV park, the creatures seemed to ignore far-flung locations, which made some sense.
They feed on humans. Of course there would be more of them where humans are.
Which meant the cities, of which there weren’t a lot of out here. Earl’s house, as far as Keo knew, was the only occupied home for miles in every direction.
They also traded up their vehicles, swapping Jake’s bullet-riddled Chevy for a year-old Dodge Ram 1500 and Rachel’s equally damaged SUV for an off-road four-door Jeep Wrangler. They stumbled across a Nissan Frontier about five kilometers from the house and added it to their collection.
Over the next few weeks, they taught Gillian and Rachel how to handle a weapon and shoot. The women were introduced to the G42, a smaller version of the Glock he and Norris were using. They didn’t become Annie Oakley overnight, but they got good enough with the .380 caliber handguns that Keo felt comfortable giving them gun belts.
One week became two, and two became a month.
The creatures returned night after night, but they had stopped trying to break their way in. Not that there was much left for them to break. The windows remained broken from that first night and they had never bothered to fix them. They tried putting mesh screens in place of the broken glass, but the creatures kept destroying them, so they stopped doing that, too. There was no point anyway, with the burglar bars on the outside and the reinforced barricades inside. Closing every window and door an hour before nightfall became everyone’s job, and they took it seriously.
Even in the daylight, the bloodsuckers’ continued presence around the house was everywhere he looked. At night, all he had to do to was peer out the window if he forgot. They hid in the darkness of the woods, watching him back like stone sentries. And they could afford to wait because the night was theirs. He didn’t even know if they could grow old and die. Did age still matter when they could exist without half of their heads?
