by Sam Sisavath
He watched the creatures give up and move on, one by one, until there were just two left behind, still fighting with the doors. They were gaunt things, almost like deformed children with pruned flesh. They abandoned the doors and moved along the walls, angling their bodies in an effort to spy on the darkened corners inside the lobby.
A sudden wave of sadness washed over him, and he wondered if he looked like these twisted and blackened remnants of what once was. Besides the blue eyes, what really made him stand out? There wasn’t very much. The trench coat was just a façade, a vain attempt to hold onto a lie.
“You’re not who you once were, you know,” the man had said earlier on the rooftop. “What’s to stop the Ranger from shooting first and listening to you never?”
The words stung because they were honest and true. He wasn’t the man he once was. He wasn’t a man at all.
He watched the creatures pressing themselves into the glass, smearing sections of it with thick, coagulated fluid that could be anything from blood to drool or pus. This was him now, and no amount of clothing would change that. How did he ever think he could convince her of anything? When they saw him, this was what they would see—a dark, blackened thing that had once been human, but was no longer.
“You’re not who you once were, you know…”
Of course he knew. He’d always known, but he had managed to delude himself anyway, told one lie after another until he believed it, because he wanted so badly to save her, to make up for all the failures of the past. Because Mabry had to be stopped, and he knew how—
It fell from the sky and splattered against the concrete walkway, the loud crunch audible even from inside the lobby. A wave of thick black blood sprayed a nearby section of the glass wall in the aftermath.
Before he could recognize what it was—a black-eyed ghoul falling from above and obliterating itself against the pavement—another, then another, then still another fell like raindrops. They smashed into the sidewalk and road one by one, covering more sections of the outside wall in blood and flesh and pulverized bone—
Ghouls. Falling. From above.
The loud, unmistakable crash of breaking glass, followed by gleaming shards plummeting outside the building.
No, no. They were inside the building. How did they get inside the building?
He raced along the length of the shadowed back wall and slipped into the stairwell, and went up. He was almost floating in the air, his bare feet barely touching the cold concrete steps. He once considered wearing shoes because that would have added to the façade, but shoes were cumbersome and he had come to rely on his speed. More than once, it had been the difference between life and (re)death.
He was rounding the third floor when—
Bang! A gunshot from above, coming from the twentieth floor.
The taste of silver drenched his tongue all the way down here. Silver bullets. Either the man or the woman had fired. It didn’t matter who, because they had just alerted the entire city to their location, and they wouldn’t have done that unless they absolutely had to.
Sixth floor…
A short, startled scream. The woman.
Eighth floor…
The pop-pop-pop of automatic rifle fire began blasting through the building, and his skin rippled from head to toe as more silver was exposed to air.
Tenth floor…
He pushed harder as the shots came faster and louder. Every inch of him wanted to flee in the other direction, the growing proximity to silver nauseating. The metal wouldn’t kill him unless it struck his brain, but it still hurt everywhere else. A lot.
He pushed on.
Fifteenth floor…
The man was shouting, telling the woman to run, run, run.
Sixteenth…
A constant stream of pop-pop-pop now. So much silver that he wanted to wretch just to get it out of his system, but he couldn’t remember how.
Twentieth!
A loud bang! as the stairwell door flew open and the woman stumbled into it back-first, fire spitting back into the floor from the barrel of her rifle. She heard him, spun around, the brown of her eyes widening—
Recognition flashed across her face, and she spun back to the open doorway and continued firing into it. “Hurry up!” she shouted. “It’s here!”
“Fuck!” the man said as he stumbled into the stairwell, firing his entire magazine into the floor at full-auto. The man spun around, saw him, and shouted, “We’re fucked, pal!”
“Go,” he hissed.
“Go where?”
“Down.”
“Down?”
“Down!” he shouted, grabbing the man by the jacket collar and jerking him down the steps. It took all of his self-control not to throw the man like a sack of useless flesh, because it would have been so, so easy.
The woman didn’t need any encouragement; she raced down the steps, and they locked eyes for half a heartbeat as she passed him.
“Go,” he hissed.
She went, reloading from a pouch around her waist as she did so.
“Come on!” the man shouted from below.
“Go!” he hissed.
The man gave him a confused look.
“We’ll meet again!” he shouted.
The man might have nodded, but by then he had turned around to face the open door and the twentieth floor beyond.
They had broken through the windows—or, at least, the ones who had survived the climb up the side of the buildings. How many others hadn’t made it up and were still falling, splattering one by one against the sidewalks below? The survivors were now crawling over their dead and toward him.
“There you are,” the familiar voice said inside his head.
He grabbed the first black-eyed ghoul that reached him around the neck and smashed it into the wall, its frail bones crumbling under its skin like twigs. He felt no satisfaction in hearing the crack of its limbs, the snap of its neck. There might have even been some strange surge of sadness, but he passed that off to Mabry invading his mind, trying to slow him down with his words.
“I told you I’d find you again.”
He used the flopping creature as a weapon, hitting one, two, three more of the monsters as he pushed into the floor, leaving the stairwell behind. The taste of silver lingering in the air—still embedded in the twisted bodies of dead ghouls on the floor—threatened to overwhelm him, but he thought of the alternative and kept going.
“There is no safety. No sanctuary.”
He waded through the throng of flesh and bone and squealing things, striking and pushing and punching and kicking what he could. They were like children, grabbing at his legs and trying to cling to his arms. Bony fingers clutched at his elbows and knees and snaked around his throat in an attempt to impede his progress.
“Nowhere that I can’t find you again and again and again.”
They had stopped trying to reach the stairwell behind him, their pursuit of the man and woman forgotten because he was their singular purpose, their goal. Mabry’s voice rushed through his head as it did theirs, because his blood flowed through all their veins. What they saw, he saw. What he commanded, they did.
“Embrace what you are. What you’ve become.”
He grabbed another one by the throat and began using it as a battering ram. He smashed skull into skull, leaping over grasping arms, and snapped limbs as he landed. A chest caved under him and covered him in black liquid from head to toe. His vision began to darken as fluids that weren’t his own splashed his eyes.
“You have so much potential. We could do so much together in the years to come…”
Bony fingers continued scraping against the brick and mortar outside the building, signaling that more of them were coming. Too many. Always too many. Hands appeared out of the darkness and grappled onto the windowsills, pulling up rail-thin creatures with accusing black eyes.
“The decades to come…”
Blood gushed around him, splattering every part of his moving form in
thick chunks. Theirs. His. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore.
“…the centuries…”
His vision had all but disappeared, forcing him to glimpse the far wall across the floor through a black fog that was quickly darkening further and further still.
“You can’t save her. You can barely save yourself.”
He wanted to give in, to let Mabry’s voice wash over him. Every ounce of his being longed to embrace the everything, and the nothing. It would be so easy; all he had to do was stop moving, stop snapping the necks of the weak things pushing against him. All he had to do was stop punching his fists through their skulls and caving in their already shrunken chests. They screamed soundless words as he tossed them aside and kicked them across the room.
“Give in,” Mabry said, his voice soothing, comforting.
And still they came, an unrelenting tide of shriveled dark flesh and dead black eyes. They filled the floor, scrambling over cubicles, the stampede of bare feet tap-tap-tapping against the bloodied tiles.
“Come home.”
He dropped the shattered bones he’d been using as weapons and leaped. Outstretched fingers brushed against his legs and arms, every one of them inches from finding purchase, just before he smashed into the top half of one of the windows and burst out into the night air.
The kiss of the wind, cool against his flesh, made him gasp with surprise.
It had been a while since he actually felt the weather; it was always a constant balance of cold and heat, the incongruity fighting for dominance over him. Inside him. Outside him. Everywhere. It was easier not to feel at all.
But it was different this time. Tonight. Because he was flying, and the building across the street appeared, rushing toward him in a blur.
How far?
Close.
How did it get so close?
Then a figure flickered against a long stretch of glass curtain wall, a bright pool of moonlight peeking out from behind the clouds above him at last, highlighting a bony creature of black skin and gleaming blue eyes, the dirty and torn fabrics of a faded brown trench coat fluttering behind it like some kind of cape.
For a second—just a split second—he remembered how to smile, before shattering glass filled his eardrums and pain stabbed through him like a thousand spears.
Pain. Overwhelming, glorious pain.
“Pain lets you know you’re still alive,” someone had once said.
He couldn’t remember who had said it, but it would come to him eventually, like it always did.
CHAPTER 2
GABY
IT WAS PITCH dark and she could barely make out Nate’s outline on the bench next to her, though she could hear his soft breathing just fine. And there was his scent, which she had become familiar with over the last few weeks. It would have almost been romantic if they weren’t squeezed into the back of a van parked out in the open along a curb in a Texas town that was, at this very moment, infested with ghouls.
Across from them Danny was whispering, small clouds forming around his outline with every word.
“…he stops at a Wallbys pharmacy and runs up to the counter and says, out of breath, ‘Mister, mister, you got any condoms?’ The pharmacist smiles knowingly and grabs a pack and rings it up. ‘Who’s the lucky girl?’ he asks. ‘Girl?’ the guy says. ‘There’s no girl.’ The pharmacist looks confused, then realizes, ‘Ah! It’s the twenty-first century!’ ‘Lucky guy, I mean,’ the pharmacist corrects himself. To which the guy flashes an embarrassed grin and says, ‘It’s just me, I’m afraid.’ ‘But what do you need the condoms for, then?’ the pharmacist asks. ‘Well, I believe in safe sex,’ the guy answers.”
“I don’t get it,” Nate whispered.
“Because he believes in safe sex,” Danny said.
“I still don’t get it.”
“No?”
Nate shook his head. Or, at least, Gaby saw the shape of his head moving slightly left then right as he did his very best to move as little as possible.
Danny looked over at her, blue eyes barely visible in the suffocating darkness. “You get it?”
Gaby smiled back at him. “I got it.”
“That’s my girl. What say we ditch this buzzkill? He’s really bringing me down.”
“He’ll come around.”
“Yeah, I’ll come around,” Nate said. Then, softly, “As soon as you get funnier.”
“I heard that,” Danny said.
“You were supposed to.”
Nate’s head was turned in her direction, and they exchanged a smile. They were close enough that she was reasonably certain he could see her response. Of course, it was so dark in the back of the van with the grime covering up the front windshield to their right and the two smaller back windows behind them, that it was entirely possible she was wrong. It didn’t help that all three of them had taken up positions in the darkest parts of the vehicle.
A van. They were riding out the night in a van. She would have preferred a stronger hideout. Anything, in fact, but a vehicle in the middle of an open street. Not that they’d had any choice. Fleeing Hellion with daylight running out hadn’t helped; neither had all the movements inside the buildings they’d checked. It seemed as if there was a ghoul inside every single one of them.
So it was a van or nothing. She just hoped it was enough to avoid—
Whump! as something landed on the rooftop above her. That was quickly followed by the tap-tap of bare feet moving from the back of the van toward the front. Slowly, as if it had all the time (night) in the world.
Gaby slowly—oh so slowly—extended one finger and flicked off the safety on the M4 rifle in front of her. The soft click! sounded so much louder inside the close confines of the vehicle, though she passed that off as her imagination playing tricks with her.
Probably.
She slipped her left hand around the pistol grip underneath the carbine’s barrel and tightened it, feeling the leather fingerless gloves constricting against the cold object. Next to her, just a few inches down the bench, Nate’s breathing picked up slightly. Not a lot, but enough that she noticed. She couldn’t tell what Danny was doing across from them, but his head looked slightly tilted up toward the ceiling, so he had heard the creature landing and moving around up there as well.
There was a clicking sound in her right ear, followed by Danny’s voice, whispering through the earbud connected to the radio clipped to her hip. “Just one. We’ll sit still as mice and let them pass us by. No muss, no fuss, you can keep your virgin daughters, Gus.”
She uncurled her fingers from around the pistol grip and moved it a bit to the left, found the Push-To-Talk switch, and clicked it with as much deliberate speed as she could muster. “Roger that.”
She glanced over at one of the two back windows—one-by-one foot glass panes covered in a thick film of dirt and time and the elements. Without anything brighter than the moon outside, there was no chance of seeing out, and vice versa. She flexed her fingers to keep the blood circulating, because the last thing she needed right now was to go numb—
Whump! as the creature leaped off the roof and there was just the silence again.
Close one.
They waited to hear more sounds of ghouls outside. The creatures traveled in groups, and where there was one, there were usually more. Sometimes a lot more.
One minute became two, then three…
…five…
Click, then Danny’s voice in her right ear. “Well, that was a close one. Now, as I was saying, why don’t we dump the Natester here? He’s just dragging us down, what with his inability to understand a perfectly serviceable joke and that stupid haircut.”
“Hey,” Nate said.
“No thanks, I already ate,” Danny said. “Also, I’m not a horse, though I’ve been confused with an ass once or twice…”
*
WILDEN, TEXAS, WAS 240 square miles of unincorporated land and sat peacefully under the morning sun. To look at it from a distance, as they ha
d while rushing by it on State Highway 105, thankful to just be alive after the mess in Hellion, she hadn’t thought there was anything worth salvaging. The hour or so they had spent looking had proven her correct. Not that they’d actually gone into most of the buildings; there were plenty of signs that they were occupied, and had been for the better part of a year.
The town was dead in more ways than one, but there was nothing wrong with the embracing warmth of morning. She spent a moment basking in the rays of sunlight, thankful to be in Texas. The state was never known for its cold winters, but the temperature dropped enough at night that she was glad for the extra thermal clothing they had on under their vests, and there was enough of a constant breeze in the daylight that she remained comfortable without having to add or remove layers.
Last night’s impromptu refuge was parked on the curb of FM 163, a long stretch of two-lane road (with a very generous middle) flanked by the occasional houses, and surrounded by vast farmland. In another few years, the grass would overtake the man-made structures and there wouldn’t be much of Wilden left for passersby to see. In time this place would be forgotten, and maybe them with it.
That’s it, happy thoughts in the morning. Way to go, girl.
The van creaked up and down behind her as Danny climbed out. He stretched, making way too much noise, then rubbed his eyes before taking a long drink of water from a refilled bottle.
“Are we there yet?” he asked.
Gaby pulled a map out of one of the pockets along her stripped-down assault vest and held it up to the sunlight. “We should be there within the day. You said the road gets bumpy when we’re closer?”
“Sure, bumpy, as long as your definition of ‘bumpy’ is ‘potholes from hell.’ Then yup, it definitely gets a little bumpy.”
“I guess we should add better suspension to the list of things to look out for,” Nate said, appearing from the front of the van. The sight of his absurd Mohawk never failed to make her smile, and a part of her thought that was why he insisted on keeping it.
