Dead Stop (12 page)

Shit!

Stacey threw
aside the cardboard and sprinted for the distant main building. While she
didn’t possess the long legs of her fellow waitress, the former pom-pom girl was
in excellent shape and now put the conditioning from practicing all those dance
routines to good use. Her legs pumped like pistons as she shot away from the
garage in a standing start that would have done any of the girls on the track
team proud. She wasted no time in hitting her stride while taking in gulping
lungfuls of air.

“BEEEENNNNNNNNNNNIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!”

She screamed at
the top of her lungs as she ran. At this point the girl operated on terror and
adrenaline, instinctually understanding her role as the deer in this scenario
and the need to get back to her herd. And the pack of nightmares on her heels
grew by the second. A glance to her left showed even more black figures loping
in their strange lurching motion from the row of trucks…although those looked
like they were heading for the store side of the main building, and were too
far behind her to pose a threat.

But it was the
ones to the rear that concerned her at the moment, for she had no idea how she
fared in her race with them. Would there be time to reach the back door and
pound for assistance, or did she need to change course and attempt a longer run
for the front of the truck stop instead? The girl knew her life depended on
that decision, and the wrong choice would have her go down under the teeth and
claws of the ghoulish pack pursuing her…but she couldn’t make it without
knowing how close they were.

And that was
when she made her first mistake.

A desperate look
back revealed she had actually put distance between her and her pursuers, with
them strung out in a line behind her due to their varying speeds. A couple of
the predators who had been savaging the doomed man back at the locker room had
passed the dead woman from the garage and now led the chase. They lunged after
her with outstretched arms and jaws agape as if in silent screams. Framed in
the now pouring rain, it was a vision straight out of hell.

 But at the
same time, even though they were far from slow, she now realized she could
outpace these things. These monsters were deadly in close spaces, and could
probably chase down the average trucker or middle aged person as well. But a
healthy young adult could outrun them…at least for a while. She was going to
win this race.

And just as she
came to that conclusion her ankles clipped against each other…

…and exactly
like those girls in horror movies, she fell.

Pain flared in
her ankle and despair threatened to overwhelm the panicked girl.

No dammit!
Not like this! Please God, not like this!

She half rolled
to her feet almost in the same motion as she went down and stumbled desperately
onward towards the back door, now slowed by a noticeable limp.

“BEEEEENNNNNNNNIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
HELP MEEEEE!!!”

At this point,
the janitor remained her only hope. Injured, and having lost ground, the girl
knew the things would catch her before she could ever make the longer run for
the front door.

“BEEEENNNNIIIEEEEE
PLEEEASSEEEE!!!!”

The door grew
closer, but she could feel her pursuers closing in at the same time. They
didn’t breathe or pant, but the slap of their shoes on the wet asphalt came
from almost directly behind her.

“BENNNIEEEEEEE!!!”

Ahead, the door
cracked open like the gates of heaven, spilling the blue white light of the
kitchen area out into the strengthening storm. Benny stood in the doorway, a
look of horror frozen on his face.

Stacey could
only imagine what he was seeing…a drenched and screaming girl being pursued by
a bunch of skull faced demons…and the shock it must have been.

Please Benny,
don’t slam the door on me. Oh please don’t do that…”

She wouldn’t
have blamed him if he did, knowing full well it would have been her first
instinct if faced with the same scene. Any human would have been hard pressed
not to.

Oh please,
Benny! Just give me a few more seconds….”

Instead, the
little janitor did the last thing she ever expected.

He charged.

In an act of
seeming insanity, the older man leaped out the door towards her and ran in her
direction.

“
Niña
,
get inside!” he yelled as he flew past, and she heard him collide with the
monsters right behind her.

She staggered
the remaining feet to the doorway and wheeled to see what had become of her
unlikely savior. Benny and the two creatures were all on the ground, and they
fought to regain their feet as the rest of the horde closed in from behind.

“Benny. Come on!
RUN!!”

Stacey gripped
the doorknob so tight the whites of her knuckles stood out. Time was running
out and the monsters would be upon them in seconds. They would both be
overwhelmed by the vicious pack.

I won’t do
it,
her mind screamed at the internal voice begging her to close the door,
I
won’t leave Benny out there!

“BENNY! COME
ON!”

The little man
struggled to his feet and made for the open door as the pursuing horrors closed
the distance. He staggered as one of the things still on the ground made a
swipe at his ankle  The blow connected and he lost his balance for a
second, then righted himself with two more stumbling steps.

“BENNY!”

Stacey released
her hold on the doorframe with her other hand and reached out for her friend
instead. His face pale with exertion and fear, the man made one final lunge for
the doorway…his arm outstretched for hers.

The horde fell
upon him just as he reached the door. 

###

The Storm -
Rachel

“SOMEBODY HELP
MEEEEE!!!”

The ragged scream
tore through the restaurant, bringing all conversation to a stop. It carried a
raw edge of primal anguish so intense that Rachel had no doubt somebody was
being murdered.

She dropped her
e-reader and looked around to see the rest of the patrons staring at the door
to the kitchen in wide-eyed shock. For a frozen second in time nobody moved,
and then another agonized shriek ripped through the air.

Somebody was
getting hurt…bad…and it sounded like one of the waitresses.

It was the
second scream that jolted people into motion.

The two truckers
at the bar were closest to the kitchen, and both leapt to their feet and
charged through the door. The younger of the two rednecks at the window table
shot after them, while the bigger one fought to scoot himself out of the booth
so he could join in. Rachel ran after the younger man, wondering what in the
hell she was going to do when she got there.

Help
whoever’s hurt, you idiot! You’re a doctor, remember?

An enormous pool
of acid filled her stomach at the thought.

The last time
she had told herself that was when staring down at Matt’s crushed skull, from
where the horse had kicked him.

A person should
never, ever, walk behind a horse… especially one in distress. It was such a
basic tenet of animal husbandry she had never thought to warn her city bred
husband, or consider the possibility he didn’t know better. So when she asked
him to run to her bag to fetch some tubing, she didn’t even bother to notice
the route he took to do so.

A second later
the horse had bucked and lashed out, and she heard a sickening crunch from the
behind the large animal. She had looked up just in time to see his body hit the
ground like a rag doll.

And just like
that, she had been a widow.

You’re a
doctor! Do something!

All she could
think to do was cradle his ruined head, and scream at him to not to die.

Do something!
You’re a doctor! Do something, God Damn It!

And she hadn’t.

She had just
held him and cried his name over and over again.

Matt died within
a minute…and then the world quit making sense.

The coroner had
later assured her it was over before she ever reached him.  The man swore
to her there had been nothing she could have done even if she had been a fully
qualified neurosurgeon for humans and had all her equipment on the spot. And
her medical side agreed as it read the autopsy report with its usual clinical
detachment…the damage had been immediately fatal.

But the part
that had driven her into medicine, the same part that demanded the world make
sense, railed back that she should have done something…anything…to see to it
Matt would be there in the morning to greet her instead of being prepared for
burial on a stainless steel table. If she couldn’t have done anything, then it
had to be because the thing to be done hadn’t been discovered yet. But it had
to be out there and she had failed to come up with it when it mattered.

Another scream
brought Rachel back to the present as she pushed through the door. She snatched
a towel off a counter as she ran past, both for the comfort of having something
in hand and to be ready to staunch bleeding if necessary. She turned the corner
and came to a stop, staring in shock at the scene before here.

The two truckers
were just reaching the back door where the commotion seemed to be centered.

It was the short
haired waitress…the one she had seen the young redneck talking to earlier.

The girl was on
the floor with one foot braced against the wall, the other one against the back
door, and she seemed to be fighting with all her might to keep the door from
opening further while trying to pull somebody into the building with her.
Rachel couldn’t make out who the girl was trying to help as he was both
obscured by the waitress’s body, and the forest of arms reaching in through the
opening of the door to grab both him and the girl.

The waitress
screamed again as one of the strangely clawlike hands sank into her upper arm,
drawing blood where the tips of the fingers buried into her flesh. A second
later the first trucker, the paunchy man with white hair, reached her and
grabbed her by the shoulders to pull her back.

“No! Not me!”
the girl shrieked even as she cried out in pain over the damage being done to
her arm, “Grab Benny! They’re killing him!”

The young
redneck tried to grab the man in her arms as directed, while the older trucker
turned his attention to the hand ripping up the girls arm. At the same time,
the skinny trucker started kicking at the head of one of the attackers who had
forced himself partway in and was laying on top of the man the girl held. On
the third kick he managed to dislodge the man from where it looked like he had
been biting the shoulder of whoever the girl was trying to protect…and for the
first time he saw the face of her attackers.

Apparently, he
didn’t like what he saw.

“Holy shit!” the
thin man screamed and unbalanced himself trying to jerk away while being
crowded in between the young redneck and older trucker at the same time. The
result was him overbalancing and bending over, whereupon another grasping hand
caught him by the hair and jerked him down on top of the girl and her charge.

In another
second he was pulled headfirst and screaming halfway out the door.

Rachel could
think of nothing else to do but run up and grab the skinny trucker’s legs. It
wasn’t easy because he thrashed wildly, making grabbing him without getting
kicked almost impossible. Even worse, the white tiled floor around the door was
now red with great smears of blood, causing people to slip and slide as they
fought to accomplish whatever each of them were trying to do.

“Let me in!”

The bigger
redneck had arrived on the scene and was attempting to find a way through the
melee to get where he could do some good.

“Harley!” the
waitress screamed, “Harley! There’s more coming around on the store side where
Gladys is! You got to go get that door closed!”

“But…”

“Go!” the girl
cried out as the older trucker pried the withered hand out of her arm. “Please!
Help Marisa and Gladys! Don’t let them get in here!”

The big man hesitated
a second more, then turned and ran from the kitchen.

The battle at
the back door continued…limbs thrashing wildly and people yelling and straining
against a mostly unseen enemy. 

Rachel didn’t
have time to make sense of the melee, and fought to hold on to the skinny
trucker while slapping ineffectually at a wizened hand gripping her charges
belt, right between the “Leaping” and the “Larry.” Whoever owned that hand had
serious health problems, but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down. What the
hell were they fighting against? Hobos? Some kind of gang of diseased vagrants?
Lepers?

And then the
older trucker shifted his position, allowing her to look down the length of the
man she held, and straight into the face of the thing she was pulling against.

The woman didn’t
scream, or even recoil at the sight of the horrid monster staring back at her.
That would have required believing her eyes. She just gaped in numb shock at
the ghastly visage as it leered its deathly grin over the trucker’s shoulder.
At this distance, there could be no kidding herself into believing it was
somebody in a mask or well crafted makeup.

This was the
real thing. That was a real, blood drenched skull snarling back at her.

Somebody…some
absolute maniac… had cut their own face off.

And as she
watched, she could see its bare muscles flex as its jaws opened wide and it
turned its face towards the trucker’s neck.

“Nooooo!!!”
Rachel cried out for the first time, redoubling her efforts to save the man
even as she knew what was about to happen.

The horror’s
teeth sunk into the side of the thrashing man’s neck as he attempted to twist
away from it. Leaping Larry Brown screamed in a way Rachel would never forget.
It was a cry of both pain and denial, a last agonized rejection of the reality
that his time had come and this was how it would end. The rotten teeth sliced
into his jugular and carotid artery, causing blood to fountain into and around
the monsters jaws, and drenching the people underneath.