He sat up slowly, careful not to jostle Anna too much. He grabbed the flashlight from the nightstand. The floor was cool under his feet, and he stood. He moved slowly, making his way by memory and touch to the door.
He turned the handle and winced at the slight creak of hinges. He paused for a moment and wondered if he should get his pistol. If something was in here, he would have heard it get in. They all would have.
At least, that’s what he told himself. The Maglite was heavy enough to make a decent weapon. He wouldn’t need a weapon anyway; it was probably just Bradley.
He pulled the door open the rest of the way and saw moonlight from the unbarricaded back door filtering through the blinds. It pooled on the floor in a stark gray contrast to the soft blackness of the house.
It was in the pool of light that he saw the flicker of a shadow. It was so brief that he almost thought he imagined it. Maybe he did.
He frowned and his heart involuntarily jumped and sped up. Should he call out?
He edged forward down the dark hallway. He held the light up with his finger on the button, ready to turn it on. Something told him to keep it off, to wait, just to be sure.
He advanced to the living room, his feet silent on the cool hardwood. Nothing else flickered in that pool of light, but now he had to turn the corner and confront the kitchen.
He realized that he was anticipating someone, or something, to be in there waiting for him. Maybe Stewart had come home?
He took a silent deep breath and released it, then pivoted around the corner. His light was raised and ready to bash in some monster’s head, should it be necessary.
There was nothing there.
There should have been. He felt a sense of awareness, some intelligence nearby. He felt watched. The hairs on the back of his neck rose and he was barely stopping himself from clicking on the flashlight or running back for his pistol and hoping whatever it was wouldn’t attack him with his back turned.
Shit.
“Stewart?” he whispered out into the dark.
The kitchen and dining room were still and silent. The pantry door was closed as they had left it. What was bothering him the most was the laundry room door. It was cracked. A sliver of blackness swallowed the dim moonlight that had been able to make its way into the room.
He had closed that door himself before bed.
It had to be Stewart, right? That was Stew’s room now, pretty much. Nobody else would be in there.
He found himself imagining unbelievable horrors lurking there, peeking out at him through that unsettling crack in the door. Things worse than the flying muties, worse even than the skittering crawling monstrosities they had encountered at the grocery store.
He realized he had frozen there, in full view of anything that might be skulking in the dark. He had let himself become afraid, and that made him angry. This was his house. Nothing should have been able to make him feel this way. Nothing.
He gritted his teeth and clicked on the light, fully aware that he was potentially making himself a target. If it was some sort of mutie monster, he was probably already fully visible anyway.
He swept the beam over the crack in the door and stalked over. He pushed it open until it hit the wall. It would have bounced back, but he wedged his foot against it. The harsh, white LED light brushed the room, revealing nothing.
Maybe it had all been in his imagination. It wouldn’t be the first time he had working himself up over nothing. Of course, the last time he had been a kid…
A drop of wetness landed on the back of his hand, and he looked down at it in confusion. Water? He looked up.
Holy hell.
He backed out of the room and knocked over a dining chair in his haste. His light never wavered from the gaping doorway. He felt the electric, metallic energy flood his veins and his breathing hitched in harshly and stuttered out. He heard nothing over the harsh pounding in his body.
A mutie had gotten into his house.
It had pressed itself so closely to the wall over the door that he had mistaken it for a shadow. He could have been killed just now.
He heard footsteps pounding up the basement stairs.
“Jared? Are you okay?” Anna said from the hallway.
He saw their beams of light, crossing each other as they came from separate sides of the house.
“Get back!” He shouted at Anna. “Get a weapon!”
“What is it?” Bradley asked, walking swiftly to Jared. His rifle was raised in the shooting position, its mounted light pointed directly at the laundry room doorway.
“There’s a mutie in there. On the ceiling above the door.”
His mind flashed back to the moment he had looked up and seen the eyes. They were not slitted and blank like a snake. The gaze wasn’t cold and inhuman. That is what struck him the most. These eyes were full of burning intelligence, pools of blackness filled with secrets.
In that flash, that instant, he realized that whatever that was, it was like nothing they had encountered before.
“It’s new. It’s a new kind,” he said breathlessly as they all waited, their eyes trained on the empty doorway.
Bradley let out a breath. “Why is it in here? How did it get in?”
“Don’t know and don’t know.”
A flurry of movement inside the small laundry room made them jump and they backed up a little. Bradley had no clear target.
Suddenly, the door slammed closed in an explosion of sound, and they were left staring at the door.
“What the fuck, man?!” Fletch shouted. “What the fuck is it doing?” Fletch sounded a little hysterical. Jared knew exactly how he felt.
“Washing clothes?” Jared volunteered. His mouth outpaced his brain more often than not. He needed to work on that.
“Silence!” Bradley said.
They watched, and out of the corner of his eye Jared saw Anna creeping around the corner. He held up his hand and gestured for her to stop. Her eyes were wide and scared. She had a pistol held loosely by her side.
They heard a faint scraping noise near the floor, and movement caught his eye. Something was wiggling under the door!
He waited, expecting some creeping thing to be coming for them.
“What is that?” Bradley hissed.
It was an object, thin and solid. It was being pushed under the door…for what purpose? They heard the scraping again as it was edged further out into the dining room. The object was taking shape.
“Stewart’s white board!” Anna said.
Suddenly, it clicked in Jared’s head.
“Stewart! Is that you?” He walked closer and pointed the light at the board. He saw markings on the board and read them aloud.
“It says, ‘I changed. Come in'.”
Fletch snorted. “Yeah, that’s not happening. If that’s Stewart, then he needs to come out here.”
“No, I think he means that he changed, then came into the house,” Anna said. She bit her lip then called out. “Stewart? Open the door and come out!”
“We aren’t going to shoot you,” Jared added. “Even if you are creeptastic,” he muttered.
Bradley gave him a dirty look but turned back to the door as it swung open again.
In the doorway, stood the new, new Stewart. The mutie Stewart.
And he was terrifying.
His skin gleamed like a semi-transparent oil slick, though it retained human-like flesh. Jared could see the color-shifting properties, but Stew seemed to be controlling them, for now. His eyes were black and compelling. He still had the same features. His nose was the same. His mouth was the same. His teeth gleamed white and sharp, though not jagged. His clothes were wet, saturated with muddy water and rivulets of blood.
“Uh, hey?” Jared said in the stunned silence.
“Hey,” Stewart replied, whipping his head so quickly to look at Jared that it was just a blur.
Okay, that was freaky.
The word startled them less than the double-timbred quality of his voi
ce. It was Stewart’s voice, underlayed with a deep, vibrating bass. It was eerie. It was…frightening.
It caused an instinctive coldness deep in Jared’s gut. It coiled there, making him want to fight or flee. He pushed down his unwelcome, instinctive reaction and searched for something else to say.
“So, do you want some beef stew?” he asked finally.
Anna gave him a confused shake of the head and mouthed something at him that he couldn’t decipher. It might have been ‘idiot’, but he couldn’t tell.
“No,” Stewart intoned, and Jared winced at the almost demonic-sounding voice. “I already ate.”
It was an ominous statement and he had to pinch his mouth shut to keep from asking Creepy Stewart what it was that he had eaten.
Bunnies probably, or kittens?
“Will you shut up, Jared?!” Bradley said, exasperated.
“I did not realize I was talking out loud,” he replied through gritted teeth.
They were all still standing in the same positions, staring at Stewart, and he was starting to feel a little more uncomfortable. It was hard to look at him for very long without wanting to run away. It was like a thrumming pull in his chest and stomach, urging him to get away from the unnatural thing.
“Well, it seems like we’re not going to be getting any sleep tonight. Anna, will you make some coffee please?” Bradley said evenly. “Stewart, would you like to sit?”
Stewart tilted his head slightly and studied the chair. “No.”
Jared widened his eyes in silent amusement at Bradley and he was biting his cheek to hold back an incongruous and highly inappropriate grin. This whole damned situation was just bizarre.
He felt unwelcome jokes on the tip of his tongue, just begging for him to release them into the tense atmosphere. He felt he may be risking his life if he said them, so he kept quiet. For now.
It was out of character enough than Anna looked at him in concern. She then turned to Stewart, who was smelling the air. She smiled a little at him, but it looked more like a wince.
“So, um, Stewart…did you still want to go with us in the morning?” she asked, coming back in from the porch where they had a grill.
“Yes.”
“We weren’t sure you’d be back in time,” Bradley said, clasping his hands on the table.
“I felt the change.”
“So, how do you feel now?” Jared asked him.
“Like Stewart.”
“Interesting,” Jared replied, a little sarcastically.
“How do you feel now?” Stewart asked him, capturing Jared’s cadence in completely unnatural way.
“A little creeped out,” he answered.
“I can smell your fear,” Stewart said blandly.
Was that a threat, or merely an observation?
“That’s…interesting.” He was starting to feel a bit foolish.
“You all fear me. Except you,” Stewart said to Bradley.
Bradley smiled.
“So, this change. Is it…better?” Anna asked.
“Yes.”
“Interes—ow” Anna pinched is shoulder to stop him from talking.
Probably just as well. He didn’t have anything new to add.
Suddenly Stewart was a blur of motion and the back door opened and closed rapidly. Before they knew it, he was back in the same place. Only this time, he was holding the coffee pot. The very hot coffee pot.
With his bare hands.
“When do we leave?” Stewart asked and set it before Anna.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Perilous Undertaking
Anna
She wasn’t completely sure about this.
Stewart was sitting directly behind her in the pickup truck. He had the back window open so he could ‘smell the others’…whatever that meant.
She didn’t ask.
She wasn’t as comfortable around this Stewart as she had been around regular old biter Stewart. Maybe she’d get there in time. Maybe not.
He didn’t exactly give off friendly vibes. In fact, he gave off some pretty angsty vibes, for her anyway. Around him she felt a twinge of panic buried deep inside. It wasn’t enough to want to run away screaming, but it was there. She felt it. She didn’t know why.
“Thirty-seven,” Stewart chanted in his new voice.
She preferred the days of sign language and white board, to be honest.
“Thirty-seven?” she asked.
Jared was preoccupied with peeling the frosting layer from a packaged orange cupcake with one hand and driving with the other. She winced as he shoved the orange, sugar disc into his mouth and let Anna question Stewart.
He was going to be sorry when he realized that dentists were a thing of the past.
“There are thirty-seven of the Defiled ones in there,” Stewart said, raising a hand to the woods on the right.
“The Defiled? You mean mutant freaks?” Jared asked.
“Jared, that’s rude!” Anna hissed at him. She didn’t want to hurt Stewart’s feelings. He was technically a mutant now.
“Their genetic structure has been defiled. They have progressed from the incubation stage.” Stewart said.
Anna considered that for a minute. She felt an understanding work its way into her mind. “So…if the biters are in an incubation stage, and the mutants are in the active stage?” she questioned. He nodded once and she went on. “Then what comes next?”
“That I do not know.”
They were silent. Anna considered all sorts of disturbing possibilities when Stewart spoke again. What he said stopped all her musings cold.
“You are in an arrested incubation stage,” he told her.
She took in a swift breath and Jared looked at her concerned.
“What does that mean?” he shouted.
“Her genetic structure and patterns are not defiled.”
“Yet?” she asked.
“That I do not know.”
She closed her eyes and took some calming breaths. She knew something had happened. She had gotten sick after all. That had to have caused some kind of change. She opened her eyes.
“What about Jared?” she asked.
“He is resistant.”
Immune?
They rode in silence. They had been on the road less than an hour and she was already tired. The lack of sleep, the fright, and the new information was a lot to take in. Though they were taking the least traveled routes as far as they could, it still wasn’t safe for her to sleep. She needed to help them watch for threats.
It was a thirteen-hour drive to Cheyenne Mountain on the interstate, in normal conditions. These conditions were anything but normal, and they would likely not use the interstate. Bradley had warned them severely against it.
So, they were relegated to secondary and other back roads. The interstate was their route of last resort should any other route be impassible.
They were going to have to search for fuel along the way, though they had as much as they could take in the back of the truck. The armored SUV would take more, and it was nowhere near enough to get them to Colorado. Stopping for fuel, and bathroom breaks, were going to be the most dangerous parts of the trip, aside from the towns they would sometimes have to skirt.
“Stew, you’re blending in with the seat again,” Jared said, looking in the rearview mirror. “You’re like some weird Romulan cloaking device.”
She looked back. It was kind of unsettling. She didn’t exactly feel comfortable with him sitting right behind her, but there was no way she could sit in the back without getting sick. Anti-emetics were out of the question as well. Drowsiness could get her killed.
“It takes effort to stop the camouflaging effect. I was saving my strength,” Stewart informed him with a hint of rebuke.
“Saving your strength for what?”
“For that,” Stew answered, nodding out Jared’s window.
They looked out the window and Anna cried out as a large group of muties burst from the heavy vegetation on
the side of the road.
Jared swerved the truck to the right with a violent jerk. She pulled her pistol, but it was no good. Jared’s head was in the way.
“Jesus, Stew! Some warning would have been great!” Jared yelled.
They were shades of brown and grey, with dappled green spots. Camouflage, she realized. It was only a fraction of a second before they had launched themselves at the side of the truck. One reared back it’s clawed hand to strike at Jared’s window.
He slammed on the brakes, and she was glad she was wearing her seatbelt. An acrid burning smell filled the cab of the truck. She pulled her pistol and thumbed off the safety. The monster was still poised to strike, and she saw the muscle in it’s arm twitch. It was less than two seconds away from ripping Jared’s head from his shoulders.
“Down!” she yelled at Jared.
Almost without thinking, she fired over his head. The ringing began immediately in her ears and watched as the mutie weaved for a split second before falling backward from the spiderwebbed truck window.
“Stewart’s gone!” he shouted.
She looked back. It was true. Stewart wasn’t in his seat anymore. The back window was open, and she saw a blur moving rapidly through the other muties. There were no sounds beyond their own. Blur followed by black splatter, blur followed by black splatter, over and over. Within seconds, it was over.
The SUV behind them had stopped on the other side of the road, though only inches away from them. Had Jared not jerked the wheel to the right, the heavy vehicle would have rear-ended them. She wasn’t sure they would have walked away from that without serious injuries.
“Are you okay?” he asked, looking her over with wild eyes.
“Me! You’re the one who almost lost his head!”
She lunged forward and clamped her arms around his neck. She breathed in is familiar scent and felt tears prickle her eyes. Now was not the time to become a crybaby. She let him go and scooted back over.
He grazed the side of her face with a hand and gave a small grin. “I’m glad I taught you to shoot.”
“Me too.”
The Salvation Plague | Book 2 | The Mutation Page 18
