Breadcrumbs For The Nasties (Book 1): Megan

by Steven Novak

  Blueeyes motioned to a stairwell on the opposite end of the room, barely visible in the darkness. It seemed sturdy, at least more so than the others. “Up there. The higher we are the better. Should be saf—”

  The shadows hissed.

  We weren’t alone.

  Blueeyes raised his machete and pulled me close. “Shit.”

  Before we could retreat, the eyes began to appear, so white they seemed to glow, so many of them. They emerged all at once, flashing lights from the shadows, formless orbs erupting from the void. Something screeched, a high-pitched wail sharp as glass echoing throughout the structure. My heart jumped, muscles stiffened. Instinctively, I reached for Pointycrunch.

  “Your weapons are unnecessary.” The voice that originated from the darkness shook me. I jumped and dropped Pointycrunch. There was something about the inflection, the tone unlike anything I’d ever heard. Every word was stretched, every syllable desperately clinging to the one before. I could almost hear a flickering tongue.

  I moved behind Blueeyes, hiding myself behind his leg. The white eyes stared, blinked, more of them popping into existence. Twenty pairs transformed to thirty in seconds. Thirty became forty. One of them was moving toward us, strangely brighter than the rest and growing larger. Blueeyes reached for the shotgun strapped to his back and pointed the muzzle in their direction.

  Even with a shotgun pointed at it, the voice from the shadows remained steady. “Despite what you may have heard, we have no interest in devouring children. We are not animals.”

  The darkness parted and something vaguely resembling a man stepped into the light. His skin was grayish-white, flaky like chalk, bloated veins like the fissures in pavement running along his skull. He was dressed in filthy rags, hanging loosely from wiry shoulders. When he looked at me, he smiled—at least, I think it was a smile. His lips curled upward, dry skin cracked. There were rows of yellow teeth extending deep into his mouth and down his throat, at least fifteen teeth, each tooth sharper than the last. His arms were gangly things, disproportionate to the rest of his body, fingers reaching his knees. His entire body was a bony mess of awkward angles. Every time he moved new lumps appeared, new bones threatening to break the surface.

  Blueeyes’ finger tightened on the trigger. “Close enough.”

  The shadows didn’t appreciate the threat. They hissed in unison.

  Sensing their anger, the bony thing in front of us lifted his arm and motioned for the group to relax. His face grew serious. His gaze narrowed, focusing on Blueeyes. “We leave the eating of children to the breathers, sir. You have my assurance that none among us will harm the girl.” Suddenly, his chin lifted. His nostrils flared. He was sniffing, inhaling a particular scent in the air and desperately trying to make sense of it.

  When he was through, his milky eyes settled again on Blueeyes. “And you…you’re something different…you we can’t eat…you’re…” Blank eyes widened. “What exactly are you?”

  12.

  I’d never seen a biter before. I’d seen the aftermath of their attacks, but never one in person and never so close. Truthfully, at the time I had no idea that’s what I was looking at. Everything was a monster. Everything wanted to kill me, eat me. At some point, the differences between them no longer mattered. The creature’s eyes remained on Blueeyes, wild and wide, mouth agape. It seemed confused by his very existence.

  My traveling companion didn’t move, didn’t blink. His shotgun remained forward, machete at the ready. “What are you talking about?”

  The biter grinned. “I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re not one of us, not one of them…” His bony finger pointed in my direction, and I shivered. “Certainly not one of her.”

  Blueeyes nudged me backward. He didn’t like what he was hearing, that much was obvious. He didn’t want to hear it anymore. “We’re leaving.”

  “Wait!” There was a sense of urgency in the biter’s voice. “Please!” When he took a step forward, Blueeyes took one as well.

  There was no subtlety in the maneuver. Blueeyes would not be trifled with. He would not back down from anything, ever.

  The creature sensed this as well. It lowered its arms and relaxed its stance, changing tactics. “You will not survive out there. Howlers patrol this area regularly. They’re as much a danger to us as they are to you. Doesn’t matter that they can’t eat us…happy simply killing. They know we’re here and stay away when we’re grouped. If you’re out there, alone, they will find you.” He looked at me for a moment, then back at Blueeyes. “Maybe that doesn’t matter to you, but the girl…her scent will prove…intoxicating.”

  I hated that word. I hated the way he said it. I wanted to leave. I didn’t like how he was looking at me, or the army of glowing eyes lurking in the shadows. It felt wrong, everything. I didn’t know why we weren’t leaving. We needed to leave. When I grabbed hold of Blueeyes’ pants leg and tugged, he brushed my arm away.

  The biter took a step back, voice softening in a vain attempt to sound more human. “My name is Andrew.”

  I didn’t know why he had a name.

  I didn’t like him having a name.

  Blueeyes shared my feelings. “Don’t care what your name is.”

  The features on the biter’s face softened further, eyes dimmed. “You’ve encountered us before. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, am I? You are well aware of how things work. If you weren’t, you’d have fired your weapon already.”

  Blueeyes gave him nothing.

  The next time Andrew lifted his arm the shadow eyes began to disappear, slowly folding into the black. His expression changed again, almost pleading. “This doesn’t have to end badly.”

  Outside the howlers wailed. If Blueeyes heard them, he didn’t let on. His weapon never lowered, not an inch. He was thinking. I had no idea what he was thinking, but he was thinking, planning and putting things together, weighing his options. Time stopped. Everything quieted. No one moved. The whole of the world folded to the point of a pin, tiny and dangerous. I could hear my heartbeat, uneven, pounding against my chest. Faint whispers emerged from the shadows, muffled. It felt like hours before Blueeyes spoke.

  “Touch the girl and I kill you.”

  The biter nodded.

  “Talk to the girl and I kill you.”

  The biter nodded again.

  “Look at the girl and I kill every last one of you.”

  “Understood.”

  Blueeyes motioned to the shadows, to whispers from the abyss. “Make sure they know.”

  “I assure you there is nothi—”

  “Don’t care about assurances.” His finger tightened against the trigger. “Make sure they know.”

  “Done. In exchange for your safety I require only one th—”

  Blueeyes took another step forward and mashed the shotgun barrel against the biter’s forehead. The creature’s arms went to the air, body stiffened. The shadows hissed. The eyes reappeared. When Blueeyes spoke, he growled. “You require nothing. You stay on your side of the building, we stay on ours, and you don’t die. It’s as simple as that.”

  It was a while before the biter responded and, when he did, it was without words. One of his feet timidly slid backward, then the other. Keeping his hands in the air, he returned to the darkness, swallowed. The moment he was gone, the eyes disappeared.

  Blueeyes moved me to the corner of the building, nudged me to the wall, and told me to sit. I didn’t want to sit. I wanted to do anything but sit. I wanted to help him. I wanted to leave. We were making a mistake, staying there; I could feel it in my bones. I didn’t care how many howlers were outside or what time of night it was. The monsters outside had to be better than the eyes, better than the whispers. They were still whispering. They never stopped whispering.

  I let Blueeyes know. “We’re going to stay here? We can’t stay here.”

  “We can and we are.”

  The bluntness of his response annoyed me. “No! We can’t! I
can—”

  He squeezed my shoulders, dropped to one knee, and pinned me against the wall. His voice was measured, a hushed rage. “Quiet.” Outside the howlers screamed. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. We won’t survive out there.”

  “But what abou—”

  “You need to trust me.” He was close, so close I could feel his breath on my face and count the wrinkles on his forehead. When the moonlight hit his eyes, they glimmered. “Do you trust me, Megan?”

  I did. He was all I had. He was my friend.

  I nodded.

  I sat.

  It was a long night. I didn’t try to sleep, didn’t even close my eyes. As closely as I listened to the whispering, as hard as I tried to make sense of it, I couldn’t. It was almost another language. Every word ran together and every syllable elongated, stretched to the point they became unrecognizable. I could feel the biters watching us, their eyes far enough away to keep from being seen, yet close enough to let us know they weren’t going anywhere. It didn’t feel right, being so close to so many of them, being surrounded. I thought about Andrew. His name made me uncomfortable, the fact he even had a name at all. It was wrong. He was a monster, a biter. They were all monsters. And yet, when he looked at me, it didn’t seem like he wanted to hurt me, drink my blood and leave me on the side of the road. He was smart, aware. He wasn’t what I’d imagined or what I thought he should be. That’s what bothered me most. That’s what made it worse. For hours I sat in my corner, Pointycrunch on my lap, an arrow at the ready. Blueeyes remained on his feet less than two feet away, shotgun in one hand, machete in the other. His eyes never slipped from the shadows, subtle movements in the darkness. He never stopped listening, never relaxed. He was tracking them the entire time. I wondered if he could understand them, if he knew what they were saying. I was too scared to ask.

  As daylight approached, the shadows moved away: most of them. Thin rays of sunlight found their way through the cracks in the roof. The biters didn’t seem to like the sun and did their best to avoid it. In the morning light, the building looked larger. The top floors were overrun with biters. There must have been fifty scattered through the complex, asleep on steel beams thirty feet up, huddled in densely shadowed areas. Occasionally one of them would glance in my direction, blank eyes staring, gray tongue dragging over cracked lips. Most of them were old, sickly, on the brink of starvation. They looked like they were dying again. When one of them waved, I didn’t know how to react. It was a she, a child, not much older than me. Until that moment I had no idea there were biter children. Suppose I never considered it. Her hand lowered and her lips curled upward. She was smiling.

  Why was she smiling?

  Before I could put any more thought into it, the ceiling exploded. Stone turned to pebble, steel to shards, everything engulfed by a cloud of dust. It was loud. I felt it in my bones, in my chest and down my legs. My hands went to my ears, flaming bits of sand and debris crisscrossing the sky. When Blueeyes screamed, I couldn’t hear him. His mouth opened and a hum emerged, steady and unending. I felt something warm against the palm of my hand. It was blood. My ears were bleeding.

  The biters in the rafters scattered, leaping for the shadows, their home crumbling around them. A flurry of bullets riddled the wall beside me, tearing through stone, ricocheting off iron. Blueeyes wrapped me in his arms, devouring me with the whole of his body, gunfire popping around us. Something else exploded. Something collapsed. Blueeyes’ body jerked. Warm blood sprayed my face, soaked my hair. Suddenly, I was airborne, everything around us bending inward, everything on fire. Twisted steel swung from a cloud of soot and missed us by inches, obliterating a nearby wall. Everything turned to dust, smoky and thick. When I inhaled, it coated my insides. When I coughed, it wouldn’t let me stop. A chunk of concrete slammed into my skull. Three of them bounced off Blueeyes. Through the cloud of debris I saw guns, so many guns. They were outside the building, silhouettes against the morning light, flashing just beyond the smoke. They were moving closer. I mashed my face into Blueeyes’ chest, Pointycrunch wedged between us. His shoulder tore open, belched red. A bullet had torn through cleanly, coating his arm in crimson and bits of bone. He grunted, lurched, and grit his teeth. He never stopped moving. A chunk of his leg ripped away. A bone in his forearm snapped in two.

  Riddled with steel and engulfed in flames, a pillar near the center of the building collapsed and folded in half. Most of the second floor followed. When it fell, the biters fell with it. The ringing in my ears disappeared as quickly as it had come. Suddenly, I could hear everything, the guns and the explosions, the high-pitched wailing of the biters. One of the creatures leapt over our heads, screaming, fingers coiled into fists. I watched as it navigated the flames, exited the fiery structure and charged the firing squad outside. Within seconds it was dead. The bullets hit it all at once, everywhere. When the biter hit the ground, it did so in pieces.

  Something else exploded. Something fell. A bullet whizzed past the back of my head, so close it tossed my hair. There was too much happening, too much to take in. When I looked up at Blueeyes, his face was soaked in blood. His shoulder was unrecognizable, a chunk of pulsating meat splattered with black. We passed through a wall of smoke and found a wall of fire. In the middle were a group of biters, flames whipping around them. Their white skin had turned black, charred and peeling away, heat blisters popping. One of them looked at me, tears in his eyes, fingers scratching at burnt flesh. Before he crumpled to the dirt, he reached for me, through the flames and the smoke, as if there were something I could do.

  He was wrong.

  “This way!” Somehow the voice rose above the madness. It was Andrew. He was standing in an opening in the floor, eyes wide, impossibly skinny fingers waiving us in his direction. “Hurry!”

  Blueeyes didn’t move. I felt his body tighten, weighing his options. The gunshots were getting louder. Another section of roof broke loose, crumbling onto the biters already trapped beneath, shards of glass like rain. The structure wouldn’t last much longer. It should have fallen minutes ago. I heard voices, faint, angry, from outside the confines of our fiery abode.

  “Move in!”

  “Burn those sons of bitches!”

  A flurry of gunfire shattered the concrete behind us. Steel ripped, spewing steam. More biters screamed.

  Andrew grabbed my forearm and pulled. “We have to go!”

  Blueeyes didn’t pull back. We rushed past the biter, descended into the darkness. He followed us inside, closed the trapdoor, and locked it. With the next explosion, everything shook. It was all coming down. The trapdoor above us bent inward, nearly snapped in two. Black smoke poured into our tiny hideaway. Blueeyes pulled my face into his chest, his hand on the back of my head, fingers wrapped in filthy hair.

  “Follow me! Stay close!” Andrew hurried past us. Unable to see him, Blueeyes followed his voice and the faintest hint of his translucent eyes. The underground tunnel was cramped, no more than five feet wide in any direction. The walls were uneven, lumpy, as if they were dug by hand and dug in haste. As we moved deeper, the screams from above faded away. The gunshots slowed. Only the shuffling of biter feet remained. I pulled my face out of Blueeyes’ chest and inhaled. The air was stale and stank of decay, of things dying and already dead. I didn’t like it. With my legs wrapped around his waist, I clutched his jacket. His back was soaked, slippery with blood, torn fabric flapping. I traced the bullet holes with my fingers, too many to count. I didn’t know how he was standing. He shouldn’t have been standing. He shouldn’t have been breathing. I shouldn’t have been able to hear the heart pounding in his chest, feel his lungs inflate and his breath against the top of my head. He should have been dead.

  Even at ten, I knew he should have been dead.

  Immediately I thought of Andrew, the things he said and the uncomfortable way he looked at my friend.

  “Are you okay?” Blueeyes lowered me to the ground. I felt his hand on my face, running along my cheek, over my head, down m
y neck and across my arms. “Are you hurt?”

  He was worried. I could feel it in his fingers, hear it in his voice. He spun me around and slid his hand down my back. He was nervous. I didn’t think he could be nervous.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good.”

  In that moment it didn’t matter why he wasn’t dead. I didn’t care.

  He just wasn’t.

  We were in that tunnel for most of the day, shuffling through the darkness, following the sounds of biter feet and Andrew’s voice. I stayed behind Blueeyes, one hand holding his, the other gripping Pointycrunch. The tunnel finally opened into a room.

  The area was dimly lit, enough to see a few feet in front of us and little else. The floor was tiled, littered with debris, and stained an ugly yellow that had once been white. We followed Andrew through a door at the opposite end and into a hallway with smaller rooms lining the sides. Whatever this place was, it was old. Everything was warped and cracking. The floor was uneven, sometimes unfinished. One moment we were walking on tile and the next, dirt. There were biters everywhere, grimacing as they nursed open wounds, huddled into shadowy corners. When we passed, they looked up, eyes narrowed, staring back in anger. They didn’t want us there. That much was obvious. In a room near the end of the hall, shivering in the arms of a female biter, was the little girl who’d waved at me. She was drenched in blood, painted red, tears pouring from her eyes as she sobbed into the chest of her companion. Her arm was gone, just gone. A bloody stub remained, jagged bits of cracked bone emerging from the messy mound of flesh like a broken twig. I stopped walking. I didn’t move, couldn’t move. I couldn’t look away. Through tear-soaked eyes she glanced in my direction, her body shaking, lips quivering.

  For some reason I waved.

  Blueeyes grabbed me by the arm and jerked me forward. “Megan, come on.”