Moriah (33 page)

* * *

Riley stood stock still in the center of the mud room, her hand clenched around the handle of the boning knife. Where was Dee? Where was Kevin?
What do I do? What do I do?
The zombie outside protested, circling the rear of the house, crying out.

She looked down at the thick, red blood disappearing into the drawing room. It was dark in there, the curtains drawn against the day. Riley stood in place and concentrated on getting her breathing back under control, listening to the sounds of the house, for any sounds
within
the house.

Okay
. She had one outside the front door, a slow one. And one outside this door, a fast one.
Okay
. That accounted for two. But how many zombies were there? Five. There were five, she told herself.
No
, there
had
been five, and then yesterday Dee had shot the one. So there were four. There would be four left out there.

Where were Dee and Kevin?

Remembering the cellar entrance on the side of the house, Riley turned to the basement door. If she could get out through the basement she could run or at least get into the open and put some distance between herself and the fast little one.

When she opened the door to the basement the dead thing in its COLLEGE t-shirt was standing on the stairs. It cracked its mouth open through its beard, showing Riley its teeth.
Holy shit
. Riley latched the door.
Holy shit
.

She listened to it climb the stairs and try the door. The knob turned but the door wouldn’t open and then there were no more sounds from the basement stairs. It was standing there, she knew, waiting for her to open the door again.

The thing outside cawed.

When she had steadied herself, Riley made her way from the mud room, back through the kitchen into the sheeted room and the living room after that, aware of each room in a way she hadn’t been earlier.

In the vestibule, she peeked through the side window beside the front door. The undead in its suit and tie was still waiting on the veranda, standing around. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Riley thought about her options. She could probably take that thing out with the knife, get past it and get away from the house. Then she’d be outside with at least one booker that she knew about. The staircase above and the rooms on the other side of this entranceway were dark. The darkened rooms would lead through the house to the mud room, but the blood on the mud room floor had trailed off into those rooms and Riley had no intention of stepping into the black to find its source. What would she do if it were Dee? Or Kevin? What else could it be?

She looked up the stairs. The staircase to the second floor was shrouded in gloom. When she had left her bedroom, the sunlight through the window above the curio had forced her to raise her arm. And when she’d stepped out of the bathroom she’d thought of closing the blinds but hadn’t because she’d been walking away from the sun.

Now it was dark up there.

Riley hadn’t shut the blinds and it’d only been a few minutes at most since she’d come down the stairs. The sun couldn’t have moved that much… which left her realizing that someone else upstairs had closed the blinds after her.

Okay
,
okay
.
Have to stay calm
.

The details were what would save her now, Riley thought. The details.

Think
.

The rifles in the umbrella stand were missing. Her revolver was upstairs on the pillow—
why’d she do that
? She’d left the hand axe on the kitchen island last night and it wasn’t there now. The stench, like burnt bacon. The vestibule where she stood reeked. Blood all over the mud room floor—

The second-floor landing creaked and Riley ducked into the darkened library.

She crossed the room, the ambient light from the vestibule guiding her to a place beside a bookshelf. She stood stock-still and forced herself to remain in place. Her eyes were adjusting to the lack of light when another creak sounded, the stairs protesting beneath someone’s weight.

She heard scraping on the stairs and held her breath, listening.

It was coming down.

Who
…?

She knew without having to be told. That mutant thing. Chase. They’d written it off, believing it had perished in the flame. It had survived. It had survived and it had found them. It had tracked them from the burning pier to this island and was after each of them, exacting its revenge. She’d thought it dead: the zombies, the fire. The fire would explain the stink.

A final stair creaked as it stepped to the vestibule floor. Riley stood in the shadows. If it turned into the doorway, she would see it before it saw her. Maybe, she thought, if she stood perfectly still like she was now, it would walk past her. Riley remembered the boning knife in her sweaty palm and looked down at it. She didn’t move, listening, trying to discern anything she could, but only silence came from the vestibule.

The glass in the kitchen
crunched
and Riley forced herself from her hiding spot, back through the darkened library and into the entranceway. Resting on the first stair was the stuffed cat Fred Turner had carried, its hair singed, confirming Riley’s suspicions. She refused to allow herself to shriek.

A noise sounded from a room closer than the kitchen and Riley—abandoning stealth and silence—raced headlong up the stairwell, around the landing and up the remaining steps, into the corridor. She passed the first doors on either side, choosing the second door on her right, shutting herself inside a bedroom, locking herself in.

She’d been right. It had closed the window above the curio.

Riley backed away from the bedroom door, thinking of her revolver in the other room across the hall. She crossed the bedroom, searching for a suitable hiding spot. She considered climbing under the bed and pictured being dragged back out into the room by her ankles. Riley stepped into the bathroom that connected this bedroom to the next and pulled back the shower curtain, stepping up into the cast iron tub. She drew the curtain back into place and waited, the boning knife raised, feeling vulnerable in a way she never had before.

Dee and Kev were dead. She had to assume they were dead. The blood on the floor…The thing had killed them.

Now it was going to kill her.

No, it was going to
try
and kill her. It was going to pursue her through this house and find her and when it did…
And when it did
, Riley resolved, she would fight it until either she or it was dead.

Stop thinking of it as an it
, she admonished herself. It was a man. A man with a name.

Chase.

Different than other men she’d known, yes. The nature of its birth and its circumstances had elevated it to little more than a wild animal. Yet it was human, like her. It could feel pain. It could die.

She made herself breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth. There were no sounds from the house, though the pounding of her own heart was nearly deafening to her.

Dee had refused to recognize its humanity. For him, Chase was some kind of creature, an
it
. Riley granted that Chase’s actions—his family’s actions, too—were inhuman. But disallowing Chase’s humanity elevated him in an unhealthy way, in a manner that threatened enervation and hopelessness on their part.

No, Chase was human. Tough like his brothers, but human. And, Riley knew, her fear was understandable, so long as it did not paralyze her. She’d been frightened sitting with Anthony’s body, frightened when the old man, Thomas, and the other man—Dalton—had walked up to her. Frightened, yes, much as she was frightened now. But she’d killed them both. Like she was going to kill Chase.

The tub was cool under her feet.

* * *

For the moment she had to outthink him, outthink Chase until she had the upper hand. Hiding behind a shower curtain in a claw-footed bathtub, she was painfully aware that she did not command the upper hand. She’d fight him hand to hand if she had to, but she’d rather not.

The boning knife gripped in her palm didn’t seem like much.

The shadow passed on the other side of the shower curtain. Riley wasn’t breathing. She heard him leave the bathroom, stepping into the connecting bedroom. Riley waited another moment before stepping from the tub, locking the door to the bedroom behind Chase.

The knob turned.

HHHe was on the other side—Riley could picture him—trying the knob, and when he found it locked he started punching the door. She stared in fascinated horror as it shook violently, the stench of burned flesh rank here in the bathroom where the man had passed.

When the blade of the knife—the largest kitchen knife—splintered through the wood, Riley raced from the bathroom to the bedroom and into the hallway. She heard a door open as she darted past and Chase was behind her on the stairs as she tore down to the vestibule. She ran through the house, overturning a lamp and ladder and paint cans, Chase grunting and cursing as he crashed over and through them, after her.

* * *

She put the island between herself and Chase and turned to face him as he came into the kitchen. He was naked, his body singed, charred in places. His face gleamed pink from the heat, all of his hair seared off. Still there was no mistaking him: the size of him, the bend to his torso, one arm larger than the other, the foot crooked beneath him, a club belying the speed of which he was capable.

He gripped the kitchen knife in one hand and Riley’s fourteen-inch axe in the other. “You gonna keep runnin’?”

“Go to hell!” She screamed back at him, her voice quavering.

“Run, little girl!” Chase launched himself across the island, swatting at her with the axe, missing. He came close to clearing the island but did not, stranding himself belly-down upon it. Riley waded in, stabbing down on his outstretched form. The five-and-a-half inch boning knife sunk into his back. He cursed and swung at her again with the axe, the back of his hand knocking her clear.

Riley rebounded off the kitchen counter, tearing down the nearest object at hand, a stainless steel pot. She threw it at him and Chase—shimmying back the way he’d come—blocked it with an arm. As the pot clattered across the floor, Chase rolled from the island, regaining his feet. They faced one another with the island between them once more, Riley’s hands wrapped around the handle of a fourteen-inch stainless steel frying pan.

“This gonna be fun. You want to play?”

His burnt lips pulled back on raw gums and crooked teeth—he was grinning at her—and Chase vaulted onto the island, windmilling his arms, the axe clanging against the frying pan she brought up, the knife tearing through her shirt and the flesh of her shoulder. Riley took his leg out from under him with the side of her knifed hand and Chase flopped down on the island in a seated position, thrusting the kitchen knife he welded like a rapier.

Riley side stepped and drove the palm of her hand at his throat, but Chase tucked in his chin and took the blow on the face. It laid him out on the island and she leaned in to bludgeon him with the frying pan but he had slid from the granite-top like a snake, the pan bouncing harmlessly off the island’s surface.

From the floor where he squatted, Chase lashed out at Riley with the axe. She deflected the blow with the pan and tried to step away, to put some room between herself and the murderous freak, but there was nowhere to go and Riley backed immediately into the kitchen cabinets.

They were stuck here together, between the cabinets and the island.

Chase made to his feet, taller than her, stabbing at Riley’s face with the knife. She dodged her head and it buried itself in the cabinet behind them. Riley catapulted her elbow up from its position next to her ribs, catching Chase in the mouth, knocking him back. She hit him with the frying pan and he went down. Before he could recover she was over him, bringing the frying pan up and down repeatedly. Chase tried to block her with his arms, grunting with each blow, his blood spattering the floor, the axe lost from his grip.

Riley crouched over him and raised the frying pan, intent on bringing it down and crushing his head to a—

He punched her squarely in the face and Riley stumbled back a step, tasting blood in her mouth. She threw the frying pan in his general direction and missed, the pan rebounding off the island. Riley ran, putting the kitchen and Chase behind her, hearing him slipping in the water and broken glass, regaining his feet.

She threw the mud room door open and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Come on!”

She had just opened the door to the basement—the slacker zombie stood on the top step waiting, a blank look in its eyes—when the axe blade cleaved the air and lodged itself in the doorframe. Riley screamed and backed away from the blade and the seared hand that clasped its haft, a burnt claw.

“You got me good,” Chase admitted, leaving the axe in the wall. The handle of the boning knife jutted from his back. “Yes, you did.” He took a step towards her—

“Now it’s my turn.”

—and then another, his arms raised, hands intent on her throat.