OUTSIDE

by Artyom Dereschuk

  "They've taken the food," - Maxim said, gritting his teeth. "And drained the water from the bathtubs where they’ve had the chance. Bastards want us to starve here."

  They've drained the water… Once again, it seemed like there was some connection between the water and the strange epidemic of madness that's gotten to them. The people had been complaining about tap water’s taste, the old man who I had been fighting was saying that the tap water was fine to drink, and now the thugs, stricken by the same strange disease, were wasting their time trying to leave people without the water they had stocked up on. What was going on?

  "I think there's something in the tap water," - I've voiced my concern to Maxim. "Something that makes people go crazy. Only those who were drinking it were affected by it, and those guys had the same signs of infection as the other infected."

  Maxim stood there for a few moments, pursing his lips, before saying with a sigh: "just a coincidence."

  ***

  For the remainder of the evening, we spent our efforts trying to barricade the doors to the roof. From that moment on, we were facing off against the beasts for which the locked door was not an impossible obstacle, so we had to make sure to guard against them. It would make communication between flights even more difficult, and we were all on our own, splitting into three segments, but it was the only choice we had. We couldn't ignore such a blatant hole in our defense. Our only choice at that point was to split our forces and hunker down.

  Our situation seemed to be getting worse with each day. Not only were we besieged by the monsters from the outside, but now the other-worldly threat had found its way inside the building as well. Before that, we were toying with the idea that we could keep the bandits at bay. But now, as some new life was circling through their flesh, it seemed that they had abandoned their fear of death.

  It was as if the very building we were residing in had gotten infected. A quarter of it had become a tumor, draining the rest of its resources and doing its best to speed up the whole organism's demise. The world, which in the last few days had shrunk to the size of one Khruschyovka, shrunk once more. Now, the fourth flight was a white spot on its map. "Here there be monsters."

  The people who had been robbed of food had been complaining to everyone with ears about their situation. Some of them were doing that just for the sake of it, while others, keener ones, were trying to get their luckier neighbors to share some food with them. It wasn’t rare to hear people argue over a loaf of bread. Eventually, I caved in to their pleas and gave an old man half a kilo of buckwheat. I quickly regretted that decision: for the next hour, the door of my apartment was besieged by people who had heard that I was sharing food. They didn’t care that I already had less than those who hadn’t shared – all they cared about was that I was seemingly willing to part with it, too. In their eyes, I was someone who was putting their well-being above my own, and thus could be exploited. Perhaps they were right. Their shouts and demands echoed through the stairwell outside for an hour until Maxim came and told everyone that the barricade was almost ready and if they wanted to sleep in their beds instead of cold hard stairs they had to leave. Only then did they leave me alone.

  We also had to take care of the dead: as their numbers were growing we had to come up with a way to store their bodies more efficiently. We couldn't just throw them over the edge of the roof - it would only serve to attract more monsters to us. Laying them in the basement wouldn't work for the same reason, either - we had already seen that the basement wasn't safe.

  In the end, we had to pile them up in the apartments of one of the deceased tenants. The old man probably hadn't had so many guests in many years, so he would at least have some company in the afterlife. He probably wouldn't appreciate that he and his guests were stacked like logs, but you know what they say: "the more the merrier."

  As we were leaving that apartment, I made sure to check if all the windows were closed. The last thing I needed was one of those wall-crawling creatures to find its way inside to feast on them.

  We also had to take care of the people who had been locked in their apartments by their neighbors, but it seemed that they had taken care of that for us. Once they had realized that they couldn't escape and that their doors were locked from the outside, they simply jumped out the windows. The witnesses said that they all had done it simultaneously, at the same time - as if the same fatalistic idea had struck them all at once.

  I wasn't very surprised by such a revelation. After all, their symptoms had also appeared at the same time. Those people had some sort of uniformity to them. Perhaps the cultists who had summoned the sirens that heralded the madness of the afflicted used the radio to spread their word, but the possessed men and women seemingly used something else entirely.

  Despite Maxim’s protests, who believed that my paranoia was acting up again, I decided to look into my theory that something in the tap water was causing it and ask around. It was easy to find those whose families had been affected by the event: they were the ones who grieved. What was hard was to approach them and ask about this matter.

  People were unwilling to open up and talk about it, their grief making them unresponsive. In some cases, they’d snap at me for asking seemingly absurd questions at such a critical hour, and each time that happened I wanted to give up my quest and leave them alone, and only my desire to get to the truth was pushing me forward.

  But an hour later I’d finally managed to confirm my hunch: the people who had been affected by the sudden onset of madness had been drinking tap water despite the protests of their cohabitants. I made an announcement and made sure that the information reached everyone. Some people were doubtful, but I could see in their eyes that the events of the day had scared them enough to follow my advice – just in case.

  It felt like a hollow victory – that revelation had come at a great cost, and it seemed insignificant when compared to everything we’d gone through. Besides, even though it answered some questions, it also brought up new ones: how did that thing get into the water? Was the cult behind it or were they just going along with what was happening?

  The only good thing to come out of that day was the new recruits, as Maxim liked to call them. A few disillusioned men, whose feeling of having control over their lives had dwindled during the events of the past day, and who decided to do everything in their power to take it back.

  I left it to Maxim to show them the ropes and share with them what we’d found out. I could tell that they didn’t see me as a figure of authority anyway, so leaving it to him I went to Natasha’s apartment. Despite living alone for many months, I couldn’t endure another night in solitude. I needed some company. I wanted to pretend like everything was how it used to be in the old days.

  ***

  "You know, I can’t believe that this is happening to us" – Natasha complained to me over a cup of tea. By the time that topic had come up, we’d spent a good few hours talking about everything else, playing out our old conversations about politics and news. As if the world we had lived in had still existed. So finally, when there was nothing else to talk about, Natasha decided to raise this question.

  "I hear ya" – I told her. "Between the monsters, the weird transmissions on the radio, and the possessed people I don’t even know what to think anymore."

  "I’ve never thought that living here would come to bite me so hard" – she kept on talking as if she didn’t even hear what I’ve said. "I’ve always thought that I’m missing out on life in a big city, that I could find a better job out there, that I’d be able to go on vacation more often if I didn’t live in the middle of nowhere where decent pay is unheard of… But I never imagined that something like this could happen. I mean, they wouldn’t lock down some big city, right? Would anything like this even happen in a big city?" – she asked me.

  "No, I guess not" – I answered, taking a sip of tea. "It’s one of the perks of living in the middle of nowhere."

  "It’s not just that, I think… I think this who
le phenomenon has happened here because it was bound to happen here, of all places. You know what I mean? If you live in a moldy house, you’re bound to get sick more often. And if you live in a town that used to be missing from the maps a few decades ago… You end up in our situation. As unreal as our situation is, it is real, it just had to happen somewhere, sometime. And this is the place. This is the place where the world ends – and no one outside even notices it. Am I making sense?" – she asked me.

  "I struggle to follow you" – I honestly admitted, though there was some truth to her words. The roots of the catastrophe we’d found ourselves involved in definitely stretched into our town’s dark and mysterious past – of that I was sure.

  "And to think that I could be far away from here right this moment" - Natasha let out a bitter, hollow laugh. "Nikita was offering for me to go somewhere for a vacation. He said he'd join me in a few days, after he'd get everything settled with his boss. But I didn't want to leave him alone here, so I decided to stay. I've always been here for him," - she whispered.

  "You're a good girlfriend" - I awkwardly pointed out. Somehow, I felt like she needed to hear that at that moment.

  "Oh, am I?" - she smiled at me, but the smile was crooked as if she'd forgotten how to do it. "I've wanted to leave this town for so long… I've been telling him that for years. But I've decided to stay here. And not because I love him, but because... Because he needed me. I could feel that he was yearning for attention, like a child, even if he never voiced it or showed it in any way."

  I could relate to what she was saying. I knew the feeling of being anchored down by your relationship with other people. To feel like you can't leave because they needed you where you were. I wanted to tell her that it wasn't her fault, or that she was doing him a favor and that she was a good person for doing that for him… But the words were not forthcoming.

  Suddenly, those words just didn’t feel right to me anymore. I could lie to myself, but I couldn't bring myself to lie to her as well.

  A few minutes later, I went back to my apartment – alone. When Natasha asked me if I wanted to stay, I just came up with some lazy excuse that I wanted to clean up at home. I could tell that she saw right through it, but I simply couldn’t stay there with her. I needed some alone time.

  CHAPTER 15 – A Breach

  When the morning came, Maxim had invited me to join them in strengthening the perimeter, but I declined his offer, telling him that I had something else going on. He gave me a disappointed look but then just silently turned around and left. His sigh stabbed me like a dagger between the ribs but I knew that I had important things to do. I had to keep the big picture in mind – I had to find out something about our situation.

  I spent the entire morning listening to the broadcasts, trying to eavesdrop on another transmission, but it seemed that my luck had run out. The strange cult which seemed to have an insight into what was going on had seemingly disappeared. It made sense, too: the transmission I had received the day before seemed to carry great importance, and unlike the first time, they didn't leave a time and date of when they would be broadcasting again. It seemed that their job there was done.

  Leonid wasn't heard from, either. I didn't know what that meant: perhaps he wasn't ready to risk sticking out his neck for me anymore. Perhaps their base had already fallen to the onslaught of those creatures or they had gotten possessed, too. Perhaps his higher-ups found out about our exchange and sentenced him to a tribunal, which, considering that we were in a de facto war, meant a death sentence.

  Nevertheless, I spent one hour after the other listening to the radio waves, trying to pick up something. Trying to guess the frequency, trying to hear the words where there were none. In the past, the radio had served me well to warn me about the upcoming threat, and so I felt like I needed to stay vigilant for more clues. That it was my responsibility as a sole man with a radio. I felt like our building was a submarine, submerged in the ocean of madness that swirled and whispered to me just outside our walls, and I was the listener, trying to hear the soft purring of the enemy's engines. Trying to guess their maneuvers and warn the rest of the crew ahead of time.

  Little did I know that our submarine would soon take another blow to its hull, and no amount of me listening to radio waves would warn me about that.

  After countless hours I was already dozing off. My mind was starting to play tricks on me and I was having a hard time discerning my dreams from reality. So, when I heard the distant screams of terror and panic, at first I thought that I must've finally picked up hell's radio frequency and could hear the voices of those who weren't lucky enough to escape in time or find a safe space like us.

  Only after a few seconds, I realized that the screams weren't coming from the radio. They were coming from outside of my apartment. From the stairwell.

  "The bandits?" - I jumped to my feet and grabbed my hatchet from the table near me: since the last few days, the thing wasn't leaving my side. Even when I was sleeping I was putting it somewhere within my reach, and if it wasn't so hard and sharp I'd be hiding it under my pillow.

  I had spent a good amount of time the day before washing off the blood and that black ooze from it, and as it was running down the drain I couldn't stop thinking that I had used it to harm another human being. But the moment I felt its weight in my hand all the doubts and guilt disappeared as if they too were washed away. I knew that it was my time to act.

  Rushing to the door, I stepped outside, holding the weapon ready - just in time to see an old woman running up the stairs. For a moment, I prepared to tackle her, to bring down the blade on her head, but then I noticed that she wasn't like the man I had faced off the day before. Her skin didn't have the same dark purple patches on them, and her facial expression was not of anger or disdain - only pure horror. For a moment, she froze in her tracks, noticing the hostile look in my eyes, but then she kept on running upstairs - away from something that terrified her far more than someone like me ever could.

  I recognized her. She was the same woman I had been talking to a few days ago. The one who asked Pavel's help to move her strangled neighbor to the bathroom. The one who had said that she intended to stay with her and pray for her soul. It seemed that the time for prayer was over.

  For a moment, I wondered what could it be that scared her so much. A moment later, I didn't have to guess anymore.

  I heard it.

  Down below, on the first floor. They say that humans react to sounds faster than they do to the things they see, and now I understood why. It was the primary tool of notification for our ancestors, who had dwelled in the jungle, that something was approaching them. It was the main tool to let them know: there is something near that you don't yet see. The hearing was the eyesight which could penetrate through thick leaves and look around the corner.

  And it was very well refined.

  All the way from where I was standing, I could tell what was going on. The way sounds reflected from surfaces, the way sound waves curved around the stairwell on their way up - I could picture things I hadn't yet laid eyes on just from those minute details.

  The bestial ape that had claimed a life a day before was back - and judging by the sounds it was making, it was already inside the building.

  Its grunts and hissing were loud and audible, but they lacked a certain ring to them - the ringing that a clear echo would give them. The beast was not on the stairwell - not yet. But its sounds weren't muffled either, which meant that nothing stood in its way.

  Did it somehow break the door? No, the sound of its grunts was somehow soft, uncertain around the edges. As if it bounced from the soft surfaces on its way to me and lost some of its crispness. Soft surfaces like the foam that covered all of the doors from within, or the wallpapers and cushions on a sofa. The beast was in one of the apartments. An apartment that remained open when the woman escaped it, running for her life.

  How? I didn't know for sure, but I didn't have to ask, either. There was only one certain way it
could have entered the apartment - by tearing the grates off the windows. With how much strength its body carried, I was surprised it hadn't done that already. Barring any miracles or hidden abilities the creature possessed, it was the only way it could've found its way inside.

  How many steps I'd have to take down those stairs to stand in front of the door to the apartment where the beast was? Forty, fifty? How many more steps I'd have to take to stand before it - another ten?

  Sixty steps. At that moment, that was the maximum distance between us. A completely unobstructed path that both of us could walk.

  Sixty steps to death. Sixty human steps - the beast would no doubt need even less.

  My first instinct was to hide inside my apartment. If it hadn't been able to break through the main doors, it wouldn't be able to break the doors to my home, either. The grates on the windows were different - it just needed to figure out to pull on them instead of pushing.

  But what would I do then? What would we all do if it started roaming the stairwell? Hope that it would eventually leave? What if it wouldn't be able to find the exit?

  Letting things run their course meant an eventual hungry death. The only way to prevent that was to keep the beast out of the stairwell. To lock it in the apartment it was in. Deny it any more ground. I looked around to see if anyone was willing to help me, but I was all alone. The rest of the tenants had already done the obvious thing and hid in their houses.

  It was all up to me. I had to go down there and close the apartment's door.

  I wanted to bargain with fate, to offer it someone else in my place - but I was out of bargaining chips other than my life. And every second I spent thinking about it was drawing closer to the moment when the beast would inevitably start roaming between the floors.

  Cursing myself, I slowly made my way downwards - toward the source of those horrible, alien noises.

  It wasn't bravery that pushed me to such a reckless action - it was desperation. I was facing a paradox - stay safe and die or risk your life and live - and my body was telling me that it wanted to live some more.