OUTSIDE

by Artyom Dereschuk

  "If I have to cut off a few of his limbs to subdue him alive - so be it. He won't mind, will he? He'll live," - I decided the man's future for him.

  My hand squeezed the hatchet so hard I couldn't tell where its metal ended and my bone began. It was as if I was born that way. Born to kill.

  The man's eyes remained blank: his passenger had made a decision for him. Letting out a terrifying, blood-curdling groan, the man rushed at me.

  There wasn't too much space to avoid his charge: two steps back and I would fall down the flight. Perhaps that was what the man had aimed for when he grabbed me with two hands and started pushing me there.

  I was keeping him at a distance with my free hand. Without even realizing what was I doing, I raised the hatchet above my head and, before he pushed me off the stairs, brought it down on his shoulder.

  For a split second, for a moment shorter than a heartbeat of the man's racing heart, I saw the pure, pink color of his flesh as it was separated by grey steel. Saw the white of his bones, felt their rigidness put my motion to a halt.

  Then his heart pumped blood again and turned his flesh red. Pulled a crimson veil over his wound.

  He screamed in pain, hissed like some nocturnal creature, wiggled his whole body to get out of my grasp, moving with surprising speed for his age and agility. His animalistic cries made me snap out of my rage for a second - I had never laid a hand on another human being before. To see one bleed from such a gruesome wound, to know that I was the one who put them through such pain, was quite a shocking experience. I felt like a criminal, an enemy to humankind.

  But a few seconds later the red thick fluid - the same as the one that was running through my veins - suddenly changed to a black gelatinous ooze that was coming out in clumps. The substance started to bubble, to rise up and down in an effort to cover his wound. It was behaving as if it had a will of its own, separate from its carrier, and was haphazardly trying to heal the damage to its vessel. The man scooped up a handful and hungrily licked it, the strange ritual seemingly making his pain subside, before hissing at me with his now black mouth and retreating back to his apartment, dripping red and black.

  The door closed after him, and I heard the lock click - he locked himself to either heal his wounds or die in peace. A few moments later the door to the right of me opened: a scared tenant peeked outside.

  "We need to barricade his door!" - I commanded him. The man was too scared to object: he just nodded in agreement.

  "Do you have a hammer and nails? Some planks?" - I inquired. He shook his head: "No. But Mihalich does. He's a carpenter."

  "Go fetch him and get to work" - I told him before running upstairs.

  "Wait, aren't you going to help us?" - I heard his confused, scared voice. "What if he comes out again?"

  "You better finish before he does, then" - I answered, not even slowing down. I had heard the gunshots coming from the next flight of stairs, where Maxim was. If the same thing was happening there, too, then we needed to unite to fight them back together.

  On the fifth floor, a group of tenants grouped up around a sobbing woman, trying to console her. Her shoulders were shaking, and in the moments when she took her hands away from her face she revealed not only tears but a stream of blood coming from her split eyebrow. The door next to them was shaking every few seconds under blows of someone who remained locked within the apartment - I could see the key still sticking out of the keyhole.

  "He never raised a hand on me, and now… It's like he wasn't himself! Like he was sick or possessed," - she was telling everyone willing to listen.

  "Must've been drinking behind your back, then" - one of the women deduced with confidence. "I'll let him have the piece of my mind when he snaps out of it" - she told her, before noticing me approaching. Her confidence disappeared in a second, giving way to terror, and it took me a moment to realize why: I was holding a bloodied hatchet, and my clothes were covered in blood, too. In the heat of the battle, I hadn't noticed it, but now, as I was standing in front of the people, I was quickly becoming self-conscious about how I looked.

  Someone screamed, but I quickly raised my hands to show that I wasn't a threat to calm them down: "I'm okay! I'm not one of them. I'm from the militia."

  "Don't walk around looking like that - you'll scare people!" - she barked at me, but I didn't have time to argue with her.

  "No matter what you do, do not open that door" - I warned them before starting to climb up the ladder to the roof. I didn't know what strange affliction had stricken down the people, but I had seen firsthand how they behaved. If they opened the door, they would release the man inside. And I didn't want to fight another one of my former neighbors if I didn't have to.

  "But… How will I get back home?" - the wounded woman asked me. Somehow, she was looking up to me as if I was some sort of authority - I was sure the bloodied clothes and hatchet made it hard to argue with me.

  "You don't," - I said, climbing all the way up, before giving them one final look. "Your husband is a goner. Barricade the door - the men from the floor below you can help you with that."

  I didn't stick around to see if they followed my instructions - I was needed elsewhere. Climbing to the roof, I quickly covered the distance toward the entrance to the third flight, only stopping at the door. Something had attracted my attention.

  The sirens were still blaring somewhere in the distance, intending to draw in the monsters out of the town like the Pied Piper led the rats out of the village. I didn't see any of them, but…

  From where I stood I could see a street stretching into the distance. Was I making it up or did I really see a procession of people going around the corner?

  There was no mistake about it - a few dozen of them were following a hooded figure. Even from such a distance, I noticed that something seemed off about it - aside from the fact that it was outside at such a time. It was a full head taller than even the tallest of its followers, and very bulky on top of it, too. As for its movements… I wouldn't call them inhuman, but there was some strange mixture of both awkwardness and strength to them - something I couldn't quite pin down but stood out nonetheless.

  The people following the figure didn't seem alarmed or scared. I would've expected them to constantly look around, searching for beasts to leap at them around every corner, but all of them seemed to be entirely focused on the stranger that was leading them. It was as if his confidence was giving them faith to carry on without fear… Or as if they were being led by him. Like the entranced kids led by the disgruntled artist from the infamous fairy tale, they followed the figure’s every step to the sound of the sirens.

  A strange procession, almost religious by how it looked, with the sirens being their only hymn.

  Bizarre and curious as it was, I had no time to think about it. I had made a parallel to the last transmission I had received, but it was not the time to analyze it further. The procession was far away anyway. Staring at it would not give me any deeper insight into what it was.

  Opening the door, I rushed down the creaky ladder; the sirens getting duller as the walls got in the way of the sound spreading but not disappearing. New sounds from below joined them: the sounds of struggle and fight, and just as I put my foot down on the floor another shot echoed through the corridors.

  I looked over the railings to assess the situation: if there was a fight still going on, then it meant that someone was still fighting back.

  Just as I looked, someone ran from one apartment to the next. I didn't get a good look at them, but what I saw sent chills down my spine: the person moved with a strange ferocity in their moves as if driven by animalistic instinct alone.

  They were everywhere. The people who had been brain-washed into becoming ferocious killers. I didn't know if they could be brought back from beyond that threshold, but it didn't matter at that moment. What mattered was we had to stop them - then, once they were subdued, we could think about what to do with them.

  I had to be careful: it was hard
to pinpoint where exactly anyone was - or who anyone was, for that matter. The paradigm has shifted: now the threat wasn't just outside. Any person, no matter who they had been just an hour ago, could now be a threat. Anyone could now be something else other than human.

  A shot echoed through the stairwell and someone cussed and cried out in pain. I froze in my tracks: did that mean that the other side had guns, too? Or did the pain make them remember how to swear?

  "Stop cowering there, you son of a bitch! Come here, I've got something for you!" - I heard a familiar voice. Maxim! He was down there, and it seemed like he hadn't given up yet. He must've been down there, at the third stairwell, when the sirens signaled the beginning of the assault. I felt relieved: so not only people were fighting back, but I also knew those people! Which meant that they wouldn't shoot me on sight, thinking that I was one of the possessed.

  I was afraid to descend. I was still shaken up by my earlier confrontation. But I knew that just standing around wouldn't do me any good - I had to either leave or come down and join the fight. My fury was running on fumes, and yet there was enough for me to make the decision: I quickly ran down the stairs, trying to make as little sound as possible, and looked around.

  Some of the doors to the apartments were wide open and judging by the chaos inside and occasional blood splatters on the walls, I could tell that the fight broke out there very recently. It made sense how the assailants made it inside the apartments - over the last few days, people started leaving their doors open so that their neighbors could come in at any time to have a talk or share the news. It was heartbreaking to see how horribly their trust backfired on them, but it wasn't the main thing that concerned me.

  Back at our flight, from what I'd seen, only two people had become possessed, but just two people couldn't cause so much chaos in such a short amount of time. Had the third flight had more cases? Had there been a horde of mindless zombies just a few floors below me, rummaging through the apartments on their way down and tearing everyone limb from limb?

  How soon would they reach the first floor and turn back?

  I could definitely hear the sounds of struggle down below, but the wailing of the sirens was making it hard to focus.

  "Are you holding him? Are you holding him good? Stay here, I'll go check out the others!" - I heard a familiar voice coming from one of the apartments before a man holding a gun stepped outside. He raised the weapon to shoot me down, but a moment later he recognized me and lowered the weapon.

  "Yura! Don't stand there, hide! They have the guns!" - Maxim shouted at me.

  "Guns? Where did the possessed get the guns?" - was all I could think before one of them appeared around the corner of the stairwell.

  I recognized him by purple inky spots under his skin, by the neurotic, twitchy movements of his arms… But I also recognized the bald head, the tracksuit, the pale skin which hadn't seen the sun in decades… A bandit. One of those who had threatened to kill me if he'd ever see me again just the day before.

  In his hands, he was holding a pistol - similar to the one Pavel had had, and in his other hand, he had an awkwardly big checkered plastic bag - like the ones old people use when going to the market for food, and from a short glance I could tell that it was filled to the brim with food of all kinds. If not for the gun, on any other day he would seem like a man coming back home from grocery shopping, but I knew that it wasn't just a purchase - it was a trophy.

  What Pavel had been so afraid of came true, and on the very next day at that. Running out of food to eat, they turned to the rest of the flights, and we were powerless to stop them. I wasn't sure if they were acting on their own accord or their strange ailment was making them act up, but that didn't matter at the moment. What mattered that they were in there with us. A tumor spreading through our building and consuming everything it could reach.

  He - it - glanced at me, and for a moment, it seemed like it recognized me. For a moment the primal darkness in its eyes lit up with a spark of realization that he knew who I was, before reverting to his violent side and aiming a gun at me. The shot knocked a piece of plaster out of the wall behind me - just a bit to the left of my head.

  "Take cover!" - Maxim shouted at me, hiding inside the apartment. He raised Pavel's pistol and took a few shots at the bandit, but none of them had found their targets.

  "Blyat[13]!" - I screamed, hiding inside another apartment. In an attempt to get out of the line of fire, I dramatically leaped inside one of the open apartments and crawled away from the door. My heart was racing and my thoughts were a mess. What the hell was going on? First the creatures were outside, and now the bandits were looting us during what seemed like a zombie outbreak? It was bad enough to get eaten by the creatures outside, but now I had to be afraid of getting shot, too?

  Maxim was heavily involved in the shootout, trying to hold them back. He had a better cover than the other man: while he was peeking around the corner to take a shot, the bandit was out in the open, with nowhere to hide on the landing between the floors. It almost seemed like Maxim could win this, but then a third gun joined their firefight, and the number of new holes on the walls near Maxim started increasing at double the rate. The thug had an ally coming to help him, and it was only a matter of time before Maxim would run out of ammo.

  "Blyat!" - Maxim screamed as the bullet grazed his forearm. "I can't hold them back, Yura! Close the door!" - with that, he slammed his door shut. I heard the lock click as he locked himself up, and not a second later I heard two sets of footsteps. The bandits were coming up. How much time did I have before they'd see me? A second? Two seconds?

  I jumped from my feet to close the door, but just as I stood up, the possessed thing entered the stairway - just in time to see me stand up. Had I remained on the floor he wouldn't have noticed me, but it seemed that my luck was finally running out. He sent a careless shot in my direction, meant to scare me away from the door, and I had to quickly scuttle away, into the depths of the apartment. Into a dead-end.

  The room I ended up in was a kitchen. It seemed my earlier estimate was the correct one: they had come there to take away the tenant's food, and they had been going from one apartment to the next. The cupboards were wide open, with some missing the doors where the burglars tore them out in a rush to get as much food as possible. The fridge was wide open, too, demonstrating its empty, pristine white insides.

  They had already been there. They knew the layout of the apartment. And nothing was stopping them from coming inside.

  I could hear them right outside the apartment. At least two of them. They quietly made their way into the hallway, the careless shuffling of their feet heard even through the distant sirens.

  It was so strange and bizarre: the sirens were warning me of danger far away, while the actual threat was just a few meters away from me. I was involved in a very small, almost domestic act of violence. The intruders were at my doorstep, and I had to do my best to defend myself. No police were going to help me. The neighbors wouldn't call them. There was no one to call.

  I was on my own.

  What was the plan? Suppose I'd be able to ambush the first one. Since I was hiding behind the corner, he wouldn't be able to shoot me before entering the room, and I wouldn't be able to hit him with my hatchet before that. The moment he'd step beyond the kitchen threshold, we'd be locked in a bizarre version of a Mexican stand-off. The difference was, of course, that I wasn't packing a firearm… and that there were at least two of them.

  Suppose I'd be able to land my strike on the first one before he'd have a chance to shoot me. What was I going to do about the second one? Was I going to use the body of the one I'd killed as a meat shield? I strongly suspected that it only worked in the movies. Once I'd deal with the first one, the second one would finish me off. He would know where I was hiding and there wasn't too much room in the kitchen to hide or jump out of his line of fire. I was a sitting duck, waiting for them to strike.

  I heard one of them slowly head my way. Ou
r confrontation was maybe seconds away. He came closer to the door. It shook gently when his hand touched the doorknob. I raised my hatchet above my head, afraid to even blink.

  At that moment, the howling of the sirens suddenly stopped. In the abrupt silence, every sound suddenly became crystal clear. I stopped breathing mid-breath so as not to alert the intruder outside the kitchen door.

  He stopped, too. Made another step. And another one. I was scared that he was going to hear my heartbeat.

  The steps were subsiding, I suddenly realized. The man was walking away as if the sirens going quiet were some sort of signal for him.

  He let out a groaning sound, his companion answered with the same one.

  "Let's go," - one of them suddenly said. "The boss says we're done here."

  Slowly, they walked out of the apartment where they, judging by the sounds, seemingly joined the rest. I heard the echo of their steps as they were going upstairs, heard the ladder quake and rattle under their feet as they were ascending to the rooftop, heard the hatch close after the last of them. They were gone. As mysteriously as they had arrived.

  Their sudden regaining of humanity alarmed me - so they could revert back! That meant that the man I attacked was not like that permanently. I had almost killed the man who was going through some sort of episode.

  But then again, they were talking about their "boss" in the present tense. I didn't hear the whizzing of radios - so how could they know? Did they have an agreement of sorts, to leave once the sirens would go silent? Or was there something else going on?

  Or maybe, their boss was always with them? Hiding right under their skin and commanding them all at once?

  "Everyone alive?" - I heard Maxim call out.

  "Yeah, I’m fine" – I shouted, trying to keep my voice even. I didn’t want to show anyone that I was scared, even if it would be nothing unusual in such a situation. Somewhere on the floors below, someone cried out in pain – not everyone had come out of the confrontation unscathed.

  Maxim was already on the staircase when I walked out of the apartment. The man seemed shaken.