Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
While Greg peers in through the gaping holes that serve as windows to the front rooms of the town house, I look at the zealots’ truck. Its headlights are on and I feel like it would be a foolish thing to keep them on. It might attract attention if we end up falling asleep and sticking around just long enough to recover from the past twenty-four hours of endless travel and constant terror. I walk around the truck, peering inside and seeing that it has hardly any supplies. They were definitely expecting to overtake us and kill us. I think that if we’d kept up the chase as long as we could and if the gas tank hadn’t been shot, we might have shaken them in a few hours. Who knows, there might still be four more people in the world if they’d just given up. I step around the ajar door and drop down into the driver’s seat, watching Greg as he checks the front door and finds that it’s locked.
I smile as he backtracks to the front window. I’m proud of all of them. We pulled off something that none of us were trained for or ever wanted to do in our lifetimes. We survived a life or death altercation with deranged fanatics. I feel strangely proud of that absurd reality now. I flip off the headlights and close the door behind me.
Chapter Six
The front of the home is fairly well boarded up, as compared to the rest of the town whose windows have all been shattered and are now gaping mouths of darkness and blackness. There are boards across the windows, protecting glass that is still shattered. The boards look like a child’s puzzle, all haphazardly nailed across the window frames. I look at the doorframe where the numbers have all slanted or sagged over the months of abandonment. The tarnished, brass numbers mean nothing now. I look at the entire world now and wonder what matters anymore. There’s so much of it that just doesn’t make sense anymore. I look at this house as nothing more than a cave. It’s a fancy cave.
Greg steps down from the door, looking up at the three stories of shattered windows and dusty brick. There is something haunting and forgotten about all of this. I don’t know who lived here, or who walked these streets, but now I’m making it my own. I look at the two by fours that are stretched across the windows and notice that Greg is checking out the one window that’s covered in plywood. The plywood is old, enduring the months with as much strength and stubbornness that it could muster. It’s pretty much Styrofoam now, soggy and eager to break. Greg reaches out and grabs the corner of the plywood, pulling on it, and the board gives way almost immediately. With a cracking sound that reminds me of biting into toast, the plywood crumbles easily with the slightest pull. Greg tears it free, chunk by chunk, before tossing the jagged pieces onto the sidewalk nearby. I look at it and know that it’s not very smart to leave such an obvious clue as to where we are.
I look up from the pieces of plywood and stare at Lexi, who is standing next to it. She’s holding her son cautiously, looking at him with an expression of love and terror written in her eyes as she watches his every movement. She’s such an eager mother and I’m impressed by her strength. Maybe this is exactly what she has always needed to get her shit together. I look at the window that Greg is burrowing into right now and I see that it’s a little high for her. We’ll be able to get her into the townhouse, but it isn’t going to be pretty. Her body has just been through the most traumatic experience that a woman’s body can go through naturally, and the fact that she’s standing right now is enough to make me want to give her a blue ribbon or a reward or something to show her how impressed I am with her. I doubt I could be standing right now if I’d just given birth.
Glancing over my shoulder, I see Noah who is still standing over his dead fanatic who is slumped against the mailbox, already blending into the dead world. Everything about the scene looks so surreal to me. Noah doesn’t care, though. Or if he does, he’s staring at the intersection, waiting for those two killers to appear magically around the corner. He’s gazing down the scope of Henry’s rifle, watching for them. There’s something different about Noah. Since he’s killed men now, I feel like he’s changed. I think it’s a cliché, but I can’t help but feel it. It’s like a black aura hanging around him. I don’t recognize the Noah who had been scared in the truck with us just a few minutes ago. How could it happen so quickly?
“Okay.” Greg knocks down the last of the plywood. He steps back from his progress and looks at it with an admiring look in his eyes. He’s pleased with himself. I look at him, impressed by the fact that he is taking charge of the situation. “Let’s get inside. We need to get off the streets.”
Greg climbs in through the hole, putting his foot up on the window ledge and hoisting himself up into the window as gracefully as he can with his pack strapped to his back. I listen as he enters the darkness, clambering into the dark, gaping eye socket of the building. As he vanishes into the shadows, I look at Lexi, seeing that she’s also staring at Greg as he slips away from us. Looking at the hole, I holster my Sig behind my back.
“Let’s do this,” I say to Lexi.
She looks at me nervously, trying to keep my nephew comfortable while she wraps him into Noah’s sweatshirt as tightly as she can. Kissing his little, bruised forehead, she hands him over to me, letting me take him in my arms for the first time since he was born. I hold him and feel a tingling deep inside of my chest. I’m swelling, full of static and excitement as I hold him, gazing into his little face with such love and adoration. He barely moves in my arms. What little squirms or movements that he makes are muffled by the sweatshirt that he’s swaddled in. The only movements that I can see are his tiny little breaths as he sleeps through all of this.
Lexi clambers in through the hole in the window with the assistance of Greg who heaves her upwards and halfway through the dark gaping maw. There’s a moment where I’m afraid that she’s not going to be able to haul herself the rest of the way through the hole, but she manages. She grips the frame of the window and a hand shoots out to take her other, blindly groping hand. I watch Greg grip her wrist and pull her up like some sort of knight in shining armor. I watch Lexi vanish into the darkness as well and I wait for her to call back for my nephew. I look at Noah, wondering if he’s even aware that we’re slipping inside of the townhouse.
“Okay, hand him over,” Lexi’s voice calls from inside the hole.
I look back at the hole and can barely make out Lexi’s form in the darkness, a silhouette of charcoal nearly lost to the blackness within. Her arms stretch out into the pale light of the dying world. Holding my nephew in my hands, I reach up and hand him gently to my sister. She takes him from me and there’s something about letting him go that fills me with dread and terror. I never want to let him go. I don’t ever want to see him leave me. It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.
As she vanishes back into the darkness of the house with my nephew, I look over my shoulder at Noah, still holding his vigil. “Hey, Noah,” I call back to him. He doesn’t move. “Noah?” I call, just making sure that he’s not completely lost in his thoughts. He flinches at my slightly louder tone. Glancing over his shoulder at me, it’s almost as if he can barely see me. “I’m going in next,” I tell him. It’s almost as if he’s not comprehending a word that I’m saying. “You’re last.”
Without saying a word, he looks back toward the intersection. I suppose that’s all I’m getting from him. Putting my hands on the sill above me, I prepare to jump. Scrambling up as quickly as I am able, I pull at the sill until I get a knee upon it. Slipping into the darkness, I drop down onto a table that’s coated with a thick layer of dust. I’m immediately absorbed into the darkness of the house, feeling blind and disoriented. I don’t feel like I’m in a house. I feel like I’ve fallen down a well.
It takes a moment for me to adjust, but once I get my grip on everything I start to take in the house for what it is. I’m standing in the middle of a home office. The walls are lined with black bookshelves holding musty, rotting books that the damp has officially ruined. The shelves are bowed under the combination of the weight of the books and their own lack of endurance against the humidity and the damp. Shoved over to the side of the room is the desk, flipped and jammed into the corner while the computer’s remains, which once sat upon it, are scattered across the room. A large impression in the wall points to someone having hurled it there. Everything smells like mold and dirt to me. There’s nothing friendly or homely about this place.
Noah climbs through the window quickly and immediately turns around and stares out of the gaping portal of light, making sure that no one spotted us entering the house. After a few minutes of silence, lingering in the office, Noah lets out a sigh. “I don’t think they saw us,” he reports as if we’ve just narrowly escaped death.
“Come on,” Greg says as we make our way through the house.
Across the entryway is the living room that spreads into the dining room and then into the kitchen in the back. It looks like someone was using this house as shelter a long time ago, but they’ve been gone for a while. The door is locked and another bookshelf is pulled in front of the door, along with a sofa just in case. I hate to think what they’re barricading themselves in from. I stare at the abandoned fireplace and the rather modern and sleek décor of the place that has aged and soured over the months of abandonment. Everything fades in time.
The weight of exhaustion hangs heavily enough on me that all I care about is collapsing onto something that’s softer than concrete, and passing out. The others are alive, still weary but having slept more than me, they still have strength. As for me, I’m just about down to the end of whatever reserves I’ve been drawing from. I watch them looking through the kitchen, rummaging in the pantry. I watch Greg moving toward the refrigerator and I immediately feel something inside of me exploding with worry.
“Don’t open that door,” I hiss at him.
He looks over his shoulder at me, his fingers just inches from the handle of the refrigerator. I know that whatever is inside of that refrigerator has had months to stew and turn into ooze and primordial slime that we don’t want to see or smell. I look up the stairs leading to the second floor and take the steps each with heavy, sleepy eyes weighing inside of my head. The upstairs is as barren as the living room. It’s as if whoever lived here was haunted and tormented by the decorations and everything else that filled this house. I can see where the pictures hung, dark outlines of rectangles and circles. The tables are barren, empty and useless now. I’m surprised they didn’t break up the tables for warmth.
I push open the doors to each of the rooms, my right hand behind my back, fingering the handle of my Sig, ready to put a hole through anything that might come bursting out, but most of the doors are already open. The bedrooms are stocked with empty cans, bottles, and boxes that used to hold food. I don’t have to look into them to know that they’re empty. The labels are soiled and stained, and the lids are all popped open. There are piles of clothes shoved into the corners and tucked under the beds. It looks like everyone was hoarding supplies in this house. I look at all the used stuff that they have and can’t help but feel like they’ve moved on. They sucked their resources dry and were forced to abandon a place they felt safe. This person wasn’t a transient like the rest of us.
I make my way into a child’s bedroom and look out over the street below. I look at pastel colors splashed around the room, the crinkled and sagging posters of Disney movies and the moldy stuffed animals sitting on shelves, looking at me. Outside, I can hear something shuffling, scratching, down on the street and I feel like there might be something out there. My mind instantly goes to the two who vanished, my imagination swirling around visions of them stealing the supplies from the truck. I take a step toward the windows, feeling the cold melting away with every step I take. The pink curtains are faded, gray and gently wafting in the breeze coming through the shattered window as I slowly lean over the sill.
It’s not the fanatics out on the street below. It’s something worse. Down on the street, I count five of them at first, but their numbers are steadily growing. They come out of the darkness, crawling out of gaping, broken windows and doors. The flesh-eaters look so inhuman that it’s hard for me to even acknowledge that they were once people. They crawl on the ground like animals, sniffing before they slowly rise up. There’s a way they stand and walk that makes me think of bats climbing on walls. They look around, hair hanging in their faces, eyes wide and bugged. As they linger in the open, they start to wander toward the truck, sensing that it’s new. They gravitate toward it, wolves approaching a dying elk. I watch them with horrified curiosity, seeing how they move, how they look at each other. They’re so eager to tear anything that’s not like them apart, but they’re completely content with each other, until something hurts one of them. It’s almost as if hot blood is all it takes to get them fired into a frenzy of bloodthirsty violence.
Turning on the truck, the creatures lick the side of the passenger’s door where the umbilical cord and placenta smacked into it before being abandoned on the side of the road. They lick the door, greedily trying to clean the blood off of the truck. The others, lurking around the corner and coming out of the alleyways between the businesses and townhouses, are more interested in the corpses lying in the middle of the street. Upon seeing the bodies, they move faster, scampering and clambering over them. They don’t fight each other for the flesh, they simply dig in, like jackals on the Serengeti. They grab ahold of limbs and sink their teeth into the exposed flesh first; others, more desperate, dig into the clothed torsos and legs, gnawing and tearing. The sounds are horrible, and my skin begins to crawl as I look away.
“What the hell happened to them?” Noah’s voice is soft, cautious. I look over my shoulder, jumping at the sound of his voice. His rifle off of his shoulder and in his hands, he approaches the window and looks down on the feast that’s happening beneath us. They remind me of sharks, ripping and gnawing at the flesh of the dead. I don’t like the sight of it. It could have been us down there. It could still be us down there.
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. I have no idea what would make people become animals like that. Whatever happened to them must have been traumatic and horrifying. It’s not just a psychological effect that’s changed who they are, they’re emaciated monsters, feeding on the bodies of the dead. I know that there are rumors of diseases that make you crazy, due to cannibalism, but I don’t know if those were serious or just urban legends. I’m guessing this might be one of the cases that points to them being real. I look at Noah, who is staring at them with a blank expression as they eat the dead. “They might keep others from snooping around for us.”
“Maybe,” Noah says with a grunt. “See anything worthwhile in the house?”