No one moved.
“Now!” he yelled. “You’re wasting time. Ed, tell ‘em to do it right now.”
Ed watched the carriers creep across the rooftop toward them and nodded.
Jasper handed Terry two rifles as Emily gave him a few soggy boxes of the ammunition they’d found in the family’s makeshift armory. A piercing shriek ripped through the night air as lightning flashed in the sky above, temporarily blinding the creatures.
“Help the others down,” Ed said to Trish.
“What about you?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Not with that shoulder.”
“I’ll help,” Emily said.
Trish gave Ed a stern look. “Don’t do anything stupid up here. We’ll find Zach and Jeremy and when we do you need to be there for them. Don’t give up hope.”
Ed nodded.
“You have to promise me.”
“I promise. Now go before we run out of time.”
She began to gather the others together, directing them toward the fire escape. The two pregnant prisoners went first, followed by the third woman they’d found in the room. They climbed down the ladder, the heavy chains making the descent more difficult. Trish followed them.
Emily knelt by Terry, placing a hand on his shoulder. “I wish I could have done more for you.”
“If the preachers are right, then you and me will catch up later,” Terry said. “And if not, then it’s been a helluva ride.”
She smiled, leaned in and kissed him on the forehead. “Thank you.”
Terry smiled back at her. “You get out of here. Take care of Jasper.”
She nodded, her lip trembling.
Jasper racked a shell into the chamber of one of the rifles and handed it to Terry. Terry nodded in return, taking it as Jasper headed toward the fire escape.
Ed walked to where Terry sat, holding his injured shoulder. Blood trickled between his fingers as he stooped beside his friend.
“I’m sorry about all this,” Ed said.
“Things go how they go,” Terry replied. “Don’t take this one personal. You’re a good leader and the others are going to need you after tonight, more than ever.”
“I should stay here with you.”
“Don’t you dare. Your boys are okay, I can feel it. You need to go find ‘em, is all. I played out my part, but there’s more left for you to do still.”
Ed met Terry’s eyes. “Thank you.”
Terry nodded. “Get going. See you on the flip side.”
Ed walked toward the fire escape as gunfire erupted behind him. He turned back to see pale figures approaching in the darkness. Terry fired off multiple shots, taking down several of the attackers. He howled and cursed at them like he was playing a video game.
He met Emily at the fire escape. She took his hand and led him onto the black metal platform.
“Go,” she said. “I’m right behind you.”
Ed descended the ladder as more gunshots rang out from the roof top.
* * *
The white bastard crept up on him in the shadows, like wolves that had learned to walk on their hind legs. Terry watched as Ed descended the steps, followed by Emily.
Good people, all of them.
The knife wound didn’t even hurt anymore. He was cold, sure, but it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. His vision seemed to shift in and out of focus and he could tell by the dark, soupy puddle around him that he’d lost a helluva lot of blood.
He saw movement in the pouring rain and he lifted the rifle. It seemed to weigh a ton. Weak from the blood loss, he figured. He sighted in the rifle on the spot and pulled the trigger twice. The carrier went down fast.
“Got you, fucker,” Terry said, grinning.
More movement. He aimed and pulled the trigger. One of the carriers went down, another one didn’t. Two more shots, however, finally took it down. He grinned even wider.
More carriers appeared, slinking out of the darkness. Too many to track them all. Lightning illuminated the rooftop and Terry gasped at the sight as at least thirty of the things cringed at the bright light.
“Bring it on, assholes,” he said. He raised the rifle and unloaded.
Carriers screamed as bullets ripped through their translucent-white flesh, blood pouring onto the rooftop as they fell. They began to charge. Terry sighted in the rifle and kept pulling the trigger, watching the pursuers fall one by one.
The hammer clicked against an empty chamber. He grabbed the second rifle and glanced down at the soggy box of ammunition. He’d never make it that far. Seemed a shame to waste good ammo.
Terry lifted the second rifle and felt the world swim around him, like a room being turned on its side. His vision went dark and then slowly returned. He lifted the rifle again, pointing it toward movement. He pulled the trigger again and again, bringing down the approaching carriers.
The magazine emptied quickly and Terry tossed the spent rifle onto the rooftop. Lightning illuminated the scene before him, revealing two dozen bodies lying on the rooftop, dark blood pooling around them as the rain pelted their corpses.
“Got ya, fuckers.”
He opened one of the boxes of ammo to reload the rifle, but the rifle had become too heavy to lift. He dropped it and his arms fell to the side, also too heavy to lift. He wished he’d lasted longer, but he’d bought his friends a good head start. Hopefully enough time.
Carriers growled from the shadows as more figures stalked along the rooftop, but Terry couldn’t move. He was tired. Very, very tired. Sleep called to him and he wanted it. All he needed to do was to close his eyes.
The world swam around him again, growing dark. He didn’t fight it. He closed his eyes, succumbing to the siren call of sleep, the Big Sleep this time. The Dirt Nap. He was just fine with that. It’d been a hard life anyway. He deserved a break.
Terry drifted away into darkness as the rain came down hard, washing away the blood that pooled around his lifeless body.
The fire escape steps led to a platform on each floor, large enough for most of the group to stand upon. They descended the floors as quickly as they could, listening to the crackling of gunfire erupting from the rooftop. Floor by floor they went until they arrived at the first floor platform. There the final section of steps leading to the ground had been removed.
“Where are the rest of the steps?” Trish yelled over a thunderclap.
“Probably removed years ago,” Ed said. “To keep kids from climbing on the rooftop.”
Ed sized up the drop to the ground. Ten feet remained between them and the ground. “I’ll go first, then Jasper.”
Emily handed Ed one of the rifles she and Terry had found inside the building. He slung it over his shoulder, wincing at the pain. He took a deep breath and jumped to the ground below, tucking into a roll when he landed. His ankles hurt, but nothing broke.
That didn’t compare to the fire in his shoulder from the bullet Alice Sappington had placed there.
He screamed, biting down hard and pushing through the blinding pain.
“You okay?” Jasper called.
“Come on!” Ed yelled.
Jasper followed, arriving onto the ground unscathed. Four stories above them, carriers howled into the night.
Ed scanned the grounds and saw no carriers. That wouldn’t last for long once the creatures figured out their meal was outside the building and not inside it. He motioned toward the rest of the group.
Emily came next, landing hard and letting out a sharp cry. Jasper ran to her and lifted her to her feet. She winced as she put weight on her ankle. “It’s okay,” she said, hobbling along.
“Are you sure?” Jasper asked. “Oh, yeah,” he added. “EMT. I forgot.”
Trish came next, landing like a gymnast. She stood quickly, drenched from the rain and muddy from the ground. “Hand me that rifle,” she said to Ed. “Your shoulder’s busted and you won’t be able to shoot.”
Ed handed her the rifle without an argument. The remaining members of the group jumped, one by one. Ed winced as the pregnant women hit the ground, wishing they had some other way, but knowing they didn’t. Jasper helped break their fall as much as possible, but they still hit hard.
Black smoke belched out of the main building as flames licked through the windows. Carriers shrieked from inside and Ed hoped the fire was having its way with them. “Over there,” he said, pointing to the second, smaller building sitting behind the main sanitarium. A hundred yards of open ground lay between them.
They ran toward the second building. Jasper supported Emily as they walked, relieving her aching ankle. They closed the distance as quickly as they could, putting a dozen then two dozen yards behind them and the burning sanitarium.
Four figures approached out of the darkness in front of them, standing between them and the safety of the second building.
“I see them,” Trish said. She knelt, sighting in the rifle on the approaching figures. They broke into a run. Trish took a moment and then pulled the trigger six times. The figures fell at different intervals mid-run, collapsing onto the wet ground. “Go!” she yelled.
They ran, the enormous sanitarium burning behind them. Thunderclaps roared in the night sky above them as the storm continued to rage. A few moments later they stood before the main entrance to the smaller building. Ed pulled on the door handle and was not completely surprised to find it locked.
“Shit,” Jasper said. “What the hell do we do now?”
“Look for a window,” Ed said. “Or any other way we can get inside.”
Jasper had just begun to search when the door opened.
Standing in the doorway Ed saw Zach and Jeremy. He hugged them both hard, so relieved and happy that he no longer felt the gunshot wound in his shoulder.
They spent the night in the second building. Using the candles they’d found, they located an old painter’s tarp bunched up in the corner of another room. Though dirty and old, it served well as a blanket for the group while they hung their soaking wet clothes to dry. The storm continued to rage for another hour or so while the acrid smell of smoke from the fire next door filled the air.
Emily stemmed the blood flow from Ed’s shoulder wound, but there was little she could do until she had some respectable supplies.
They waited out the night in the room under the tarp, sleeping in shifts. They saw no one else with guns that night inside the second building. They kept the rifles and Trish’s knife ready, just in case.
Outside, the carriers screeched, their violent calls piercing the night as Ed held his sons and Trish tightly, the four of them reunited against the considerable odds. They didn’t talk; there would be plenty of time for sharing stories the following day, when the shadows weren’t so dangerous and the world didn’t belong to monsters.
Tomorrow, decisions would have to be made. Tomorrow, they would have to deal with Terry’s death. Ed would have to figure out what to do with more than a dozen new people now sleeping in the same room with them that night. Although the remaining journey and the choices he would have to make loomed over him, Ed could only think of how lucky they were to still have each other. All other things came second.
He drifted off to dreamless sleep alongside his family.
* * *
The following morning they awoke to a day of cloudless blue skies. The sun burned bright in the sky, chasing away the shadows. They built a fire outside the building, hanging their clothes on a makeshift line while they watched smoke drift out of the sanitarium’s windows. The massive torrent of water provided by the storm had slowed the fire’s progress, extinguishing the worst of it. Only a few isolated fires still burned as the charred mass smoldered. Much of the building remained intact, a testament to the old world of construction, before fiberglass and wood replaced concrete and steel.
The bodies of dead carriers lay strewn about on the grounds surrounding the building. Many had jumped to their death from the burning building, others died from bullet wounds inflicted by Ed and the group. Either way, dead was dead, and Ed like them that way.
When their clothes had dried, Ed and Jasper took two of the rifles with them and walked around to the front of the building to retrieve the vehicles and their precious supplies.
“We should stay here for a while,” Ed said. “We need a new plan and I’ll be honest, I don’t have one yet.”
“Things have changed,” Jasper replied. “All those kids Chloe and Sam found. And the women? What the hell are we going to do with two pregnant women?”
“I’m hoping your girlfriend can help us with that.”
Jasper smiled. “She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”
“I like her,” Ed replied, smiling. “I’ll like her even more once she gets my shoulder fixed up.”
“She will.”
“She might just be good enough for you,” Ed said.
“She’s not exactly a damsel in distress, but maybe that’s not what I was really looking for anyway,” Jasper said. He paused, his face becoming serious. “She’s upset about Terry.”
“Yeah.”
“I told her not to beat herself up over it. She did what she could.”
“We all did.”
“It was a mess, for sure. Who the hell were those people running this place?”
“Monsters,” Ed said. “No other explanation for it.”
“I’m glad they’re dead.”
They rounded the corner of the main building and Jasper stopped. He shielded his eyes as he stared into the distance. “What the hell?”
Ed looked past the vehicles and stared, open-mouthed and at a loss for the proper words to describe what he saw.
Hundreds of carrier bodies littered the parking lot in front of the building, lying in the hot sun.
“Ed, what is this?”
Ed shook his head. He loaded a round into the chamber of the rifle, wincing at the dull pain in his shoulder. “Let’s have a look.”
They walked out into the parking lot, past the vehicles, rifles ready, but pointed at the ground. Around them the white, muscled bodies lay in contorted positions on the ground.
“Are they dead?” Jasper asked.
“They look it.”
“But they weren’t shot,” Jasper said. “No wounds or even any blood that I can see.”
Movement caught Ed’s eye and he swung around, raising the rifle. A carrier twitched on the ground beside him, its mouth opening and closing, revealing grotesque fangs. Its chest rose and fell as it struggled to breathe.