OUTSIDE

by Artyom Dereschuk

  I could stand up and close the curtains so that it wouldn't see me, but there was no way I'd be able to do it without making a sound - their rustling would no doubt alert even a human, never mind a monster.

  "What about Natasha?" - I suddenly thought. "Are her curtains wide open, too? What if it's looking at her at that very moment? What if she looks back at it, too afraid to move even a single muscle?"

  I was confident that the thing could scale the walls - there was no other way it'd be able to get up on the roof otherwise - unless, of course, it also had a pair of wings. So, it meant that the creature could easily crawl through the window - I was sure the thin glass wouldn't be an obstacle for it.

  "Should I go get Natasha and leave the apartment?" - I considered that option for a second. It was true that we would be safer outside the apartment. But the stairwell had windows, too, and once again, I knew there was no way I'd be able to get Natasha and get out of there without a sound, so the creature could follow us there. Even though it hadn't made its move yet, it had already gotten us cornered.

  But I didn't get to act: letting out a familiar sound, the creature scuttled away into the night. It was a good time to stand up and close the curtains - if not to hide myself, then at least to make sure I wouldn't see it. I now understood why kids were closing their eyes while watching scary movies - they were relying on an ancient coping mechanism. "If I can't see it - it's not real."

  Catching any sleep seemed out of the question: I spent the next hour lying awake, listening to the outside. I had a good reason to be concerned, too: as I was laying there, I remembered where I'd heard the sounds before.

  It was the very same sound me and Natasha had heard over the radio when we were listening to the man who tried to reach the military base on the day it had all started. The last sound we heard before the transmission cut off and the man was gone.

  CHAPTER 12 – Attack

  "Wake up! Yura, wake up!" - Natasha was shaking me, trying to get me to wake up.

  "What? What's going on?" - I jumped to my feet, looking around. My gaze was instinctively attracted to the window, where I expected to see a multi-legged shadow. There was nothing there - the only thing out of the norm that I'd noticed was that the window was open, letting the cold air in. Natasha wasn't exactly whispering as she was talking to me, either. Which meant that she wasn't hiding from anything.

  "Yura, it's… Oh my god, it's so terrible" - she couldn't put it into words. As I got up from the bed, she called me over to the window. "Take a look for yourself."

  She must've seen something outside - something that had put her into such a worried state. I didn't know what it was, but I had a few guesses. Another victim? A trail of blood leading away from one of the windows? Some new, even more terrifying monstrosity which, unlike the rest, didn't hide in the shadows?

  I got up from the bed and stood next to her, looking outside. Standing near the open window in nothing but my trunks and t-shirt wasn't exactly comfortable - the air outside was quite chilly. But if I decided to go put some clothes on, I risked missing something happening outside.

  At first, I didn't see anything - the yard in front of the building which Natasha's windows overlooked seemed the same as the day before. It wasn't until I noticed something white waving in the wind a few floors below that I started putting together what was going on.

  The object that I'd seen was a rope made out of bedsheets. Coming down from the second floor, it was shaking in the wind, coiling like a snake and rising as if it, too, wanted to leave the cursed building along with its creator.

  "Someone's gotten out?" - I wondered. Natasha nodded, biting her lip: "An old man. He climbed down and ran toward the stores."

  "What?" - I couldn't believe my ears. I knew that Natasha wouldn't lie, and I was confident that she didn't misunderstand the situation, but I was refusing to accept it. "Are you sure? Couldn't he get some food from his neighbors, or endure a bit? It hasn't been that long."

  Natasha didn't have time to answer: somewhere in the distance, behind the trees, glass shattered. Judging by the rustling of glass shards that followed, the man had reached his destination and was climbing inside.

  There was my answer.

  "What an idiot," - I sighed, getting anxious. "He'll get himself killed."

  How far did the expedition for the military base had gotten? A kilometer, two? There were a dozen people there, yet not a single one of them came back. What chances did one man have?

  I glanced down: little by little, people were peeking out of their windows, curious about the origin of that sound. A few of them tried inquiring what was going on, but the rest of the tenants hushed them: they didn't want to miss a thing. The tense silence settled over our building - not the usual silence of an abandoned town. It now had the context of anticipation, it was pregnant with expectation. Only sometimes I could hear someone whispering to their neighbors, defying the silence to satisfy their curiosity.

  The silence was broken by the beast's howling: no doubt, it also heard the ruckus the man had raised. When it went silent, so did the last of the whispers I'd heard: people were now waiting to see what was going to happen. The countdown until the beast's arrival had started. The man had to return before it showed up, or he could forget about going back altogether.

  "Come on, come on" - I was whispering, counting every second. He heard the howl, didn't he? Why was he taking so long?

  I couldn't accept another death. Not after I'd joined the militia to prevent that from happening. But there was nothing I could do at that moment - not anything reasonable, at least. What could I do? Run downstairs, find a way outside and join him there?

  A few minutes later, the man showed himself. I gasped when I realized that I knew him.

  It was the same old man who'd come to visit me a few days before, looking for insulin. Back then he had said that his own stock had run dry, and he was unsuccessful in finding someone willing to share. Judging by a small package he was holding close to his chest, he had finally found what he had been looking for - but not within the walls he had been calling his home.

  The thing he needed to survive was not provided to him by his neighbors who had been engaging in small talk with him for the past sixty years. I slammed my fist onto the windowsill - if the man had gone outside it meant that he had asked everyone inside the building. How could they allow that to happen? I refused to believe that out of eighty apartments, he was the only one with diabetes.

  It seemed that I wasn't the only one who recognized him: everyone else must have recognized him as well because they've started talking about him.

  "Hey, it's that man from a few days back!"

  "Oh Igor, was it really that bad? You poor soul..."

  "Hey, Davidich, didn't you have diabetes, as well? I even pointed him toward your door, said that you'd have some insulin for sure..."

  "Hurry up, you fool! Didn't you hear that thing?"

  "Don't talk" - I whispered under my breath, my voice almost breaking. Were they really so oblivious to what they'd been doing? "Shut your goddamn mouths. You're going to attract the beast!"

  I wanted to shout that for the whole world to hear - but I couldn't. If I did, I'd become part of the problem.

  The man didn't even waste time to look around: he just rushed straight toward his improvised rope - the only thing in his tunnel vision he could see. He shoved the package he was carrying under his jacket and started scaling the rope. He was moving at a painfully slow pace - the bedsheets were slipping under his fingers and for every three feet he made it upwards he slid one foot downward.

  The entire building was shaken by another roar. The sound brought me back a few days when I'd heard it just on the other side of that metal door. That was the only time when the roar had been louder than now. Since then, it was always in the distance, always far away. We had been conditioned to just accept it as the new background noise, we've developed a habit to ignore it.

  And now, that habit was shattered.
The loud cry of the animal was just around our building's corner. It was coming from the forest - no, it was already there.

  I struck out my neck through the window to take a look at it. It had been evading my eyes since day one, and finally, after days of hiding in the shadows and stalking those who dared leave the walls of our building, it showed itself.

  From our previous encounter, I knew only one thing about it - it had one disproportionally large eye. Everything else about it had been an enigma, and after finally laying eyes on it, I was confident: my previous estimate that the creature was not of our world was correct. Even if we gave nature a hundred million years, it wouldn't come up with such an abhorrent design: any animal that would give birth to something even remotely similar to that atrocity would kill it without remorse.

  It was large - significantly larger than a bear, despite often being compared to it in the past by the people who had caught a glimpse of it. I could see where the comparison was stemming from - the animal had a large bulking body that could put even an actual bear to shame.

  It moved around on all four appendages: while I couldn't catch a glimpse of the shorter hind legs, the longer front legs ended in something that, if not for an odd number of fingers that I struggled to count, would bear an incredible similarity to human hands, even though in the case of the creature both sides of the "hand" were sporting opposable thumbs. Sometimes it walked propping itself onto its knuckles, but when it put its palm down onto the ground, stretching its fingers, I could see just how big it was – its hands' imprints were as large as a dish tray, if not bigger.

  Had it formed a fist and struck a grown man's chest it would undoubtedly crush all of his ribs at once. I shivered when I remembered the screams of the postman: back then, I couldn't even imagine what he'd been going through. Now I had a vague idea.

  The body was entirely hairless, its thick grey hide exposed to the elements, with the only exception being a patch on the creature's back, right behind where its scapula would be if it shared such anatomic features with a human. There, the black fur was thick and long - so long, in fact, that its dirty bangs - each as thick as a rope - were hanging all the way down to the ground, lightly waving left and right as the creature moved forward. Had my eyesight been any worse I'd decide that it was no fur at all, but the tentacles the creature used to grasp its prey.

  The head seemed comically small compared to the rest of the body, despite being connected to the rest of the body by a neck so burly and muscular I could see the muscle fibers peeking through the skin…and, once again, it looked remarkably human. Sure, it sported massive thick fangs, the shape of which was nothing like what you'd find in the Earth's animal kingdom, and the nose was just a cavity above it, but the general shape seemed the same.

  But of course, the biggest difference was the eye. Massive and bulging, with a transparent eyelid slowly blinking only once every ten seconds, it was so big in relation to the rest of the creature's head I was finding it hard to believe that its skull could fit anything else inside. If the creature even had a brain it must've been the size of a pea…or it was located in some other part of the body altogether.

  The iris was bright yellow - the color of a new warning sign. The color was so bright that even when the creature slowly blinked, its transparent eyelid barely concealed it. The pupil, slightly twitching as if to the beat to the creature's heart, was constantly changing shape, one second stretching into a thin vertical line and the next spreading into a formless black spot - either to hypnotize its prey or to look in all directions at once.

  "It's no bear, after all" - Natasha whispered. Her eyes were wide open as if hoping to cast a net wide enough to catch every detail, every aspect of the creature's appearance. "It's more like an ape."

  It set it’s gaze on the man on the rope, who at that moment had only managed to cover half the distance toward his window. Then, turning its head in unnatural movements as if controlled by a puppeteer, it scanned the windows, its gaze shifting from one tenant to the next. Despite having crushed a group of ten people just a few days before it was now cautious: no doubt, the number of people and all the noise they were producing made it wary.

  It turned its head toward the nearest window. I didn't envy the people who lived there: even with the steel bars between them, one couldn't feel calm when such a mighty killing machine was peeking at them from the outside.

  Then, slowly and carefully, minding every step, the mountain of muscles slowly shifted in the direction of the man who was still struggling for his life. It held its head low, and although its every move was aimed at bringing it closer to the man the yellow eye was wildly darting around, trying to figure out if the people who were out of its reach could harm it in any way. The pupil was changing its form with every face it looked into, almost as if assigning a particular shape to every person so that it would be easier to remember them later.

  Upon seeing the creature approaching, the man started squirming, trying to get inside his apartment as fast as possible. But it seemed that his additional efforts were, in fact, detrimental: either he'd exhausted himself or the anxiety was causing him to make the wrong moves, but he actually slowed down.

  "Come on, Igor, just a little bit!" - his neighbor shouted at him. "Can't you see that thing there? Come on!"

  "Hey! Over here, you beast!" - someone else called the creature over, trying to distract it. The eye reacted and glanced at the man, as if the animal understood who he was referring to, but then kept on spinning wildly, disregarding him as unnecessary.

  Someone else tried calling it, but it was now ignoring people, focusing solely on the man in front of it instead. Even though it was clear that it had chosen him as its primary target, it was not lunging toward him, not trying to get to him before he got away, taking its time instead.

  Almost as if it was waiting for something.

  The man had stopped moving altogether: he was too tired to continue. Old age was not merciful to him, quickly draining him of all the strength, and now all of his efforts were aimed toward just not falling down.

  "Come on, Igor! Don't you want to live?" - his neighbor urged him. "Use your legs, for Christ's sake!"

  "I'm trying" - the man mewled, pushing against the wall with his legs. The bedsheets the rope had been made of creaked in protest, but still held on.

  "There you go, like that! Just a little bit!" - the neighbor was pressing him. "If that thing yanks the rope you're done for! Come on!"

  "Come on, Igor! You can do it!" - people were cheering for him. The oldest scene in human history: a man trying to get up towards safety, where the rest of his kin were, while a predator stalked closer with each second.

  The rope was creaking so loud I could hear it on the fifth floor. The fabric was tearing thread by thread, and at any moment it could cause a chain reaction, with the remaining threads not being strong enough to support the man's weight.

  "Come on, Igor! You're almost there!" - people screamed. "Come on!" - Natasha joined them.

  He was right next to his window. All he had to do was reach out, grab the windowsill, and pull himself inside. The tension was so unbearable I involuntarily locked my fingers in a sign of prayer.

  "What did he even tie that rope to? How long will it hold?" - was all I could think at that moment.

  The old man reached out toward his window. His foot slipped on the wet from the rain wall. He tried grabbing onto the ledge, but his fingers missed it by a few centimeters. He fell down to the ground, landing on his right leg sideways.

  The creature's eye followed him all the way down. When he hit the ground, it let out a purring, guttural sound.

  Even from the fifth floor, I heard a loud crack - the brittle bones of his hip snapped like a dried-up breadstick. The man moaned in pain and rolled around on the ground, before trying to get up to his feet. A small white package that had fallen out of his jacket was lying on the ground below him, marking the spot where the man hit the ground. He didn't bother to try and pick it up
.

  Grabbing the rope, the man tried to scale it again, but this time he couldn't make it even one foot upwards. On top of already being exhausted, he couldn't grab it with his legs - his now dysfunctional hip was preventing him from doing so. The best he could do was wiggle left and right, with his feet dangling just a few inches above the ground.

  The beast resumed its march toward him.

  Someone threw a book at it, and it swooped down on the animal, rustling its pages menacingly, before harmlessly falling onto its back and sliding down its side. The creature paid it no more attention than it would pay a falling leaf.

  "Somebody help him, don't just stand there!" - some woman screamed.

  "What do you suggest we do?" - someone replied with annoyance as if we were talking about some minor issue rather than the man's life.

  "Do something! Go to his apartment!" - the voice from below demanded.

  A man's head stuck out of the window to the left of the one the old man had left through; his face was red and his breathing was heavy. No doubt he'd just completed a short but very intense run.

  "His apartment's door is closed! I can't get inside!" - he reported to the rest of the onlookers.

  The beast was getting closer: only another ten meters or so separated it from its prey.

  It was startled when a heavy cooking pot - a massive thing made of cast iron, able to fit around twenty liters and crafted in previous age to provide food for a family of seven - landed near it. Had it found its target, even that other-worldly monstrosity would feel it. Since it didn't, the only thing it had managed to achieve was to startle the animal for a moment.

  "Doesn't anyone have a gun?" - the pot's owner cried out in exasperation, seeing that his effort was in vain.

  Pavel had a gun, I realized. The clarity of that fact almost made me shiver from the relief of knowing what to do. He could stop the creature, scare it away. He was the only one I knew who could actually save the man!