Clack-clack-clack…
“It can’t be from the roof,” Norris said. He sounded out of breath for some reason. “There’s no way up there from outside.”
Clack-clack-clack…
Keo took a step away from the wall. Gillian, standing next to him, mirrored his movement. “Keo?” she said breathlessly.
“The wall,” Keo said. “It’s coming from the wall.”
“Where?” Norris said, almost shouting out the question.
Clack-clack-clack…
“I don’t know,” Keo said.
Did we miss something?
Shit, we must have missed something.
He clicked on the flashlight duct-taped to the side of the Remington. Norris and Jake did the same with their own flashlights, though Jake hadn’t taped his to his weapon. They took another step back and ran their beams along the wall, spreading the three halos from the top to bottom, then side to side.
Clack-clack-clack…
“I don’t see anything,” Jake said. Tori was clutching his waist from behind.
“Where the
hell
is that sound coming from?” Norris said, on the verge of shouting.
Keo pointed the shotgun at the spot where the wall joined the ceiling. He moved his flashlight beam from left to right until something metallic and soft-white gleamed in the pool of light.
It was a ventilation grill, held in place by two hinges along the left side.
Clack-clack-clack…
Keo took a step toward it, angling the light to look through the elongated, curvy slits that made up anywhere from ninety to ninety-five percent of the grill. He expected to see a box-shaped air filter on the other side through the louvers, but instead there was
a pair of lifeless black eyes
glinting in the flashlight beam.
“They’re in the vent!” Keo shouted. “They’re in the fucking vent!”
The ventilation grill
was 24x24 inches, big enough to pour as much cold air (or heat, in the winter) into the police station from a large air conditioner unit somewhere outside. The grill itself was made of sturdy solid steel construction. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was fastened to the wall by two simple hinges and could be easily loosened by twisting two latches in the right direction.
Or, failing that, slamming really hard into it.
And that was what the creature did. The first time it smashed its entire body into the 2x2 feet grill, the result was minimal. If it had given up then, things would have been fine.
But it didn’t give up.
It crashed into the vent again and again and again, and each time the latches moved a little bit more. Ventilation grills were meant to be opened easily so that replacing air filters wasn’t a chore. Not that Keo thought the creature slamming its entire body into the grill knew that. Just as it didn’t know—or seem to care—that it was skewering itself against the louvers, cutting its flesh with every impact. Pools of black wetness had begun to spread and drip down the wall.
Norris’s flashlight beam lit up the creature as he stumbled back in shock. “Fuck!” he shouted, and aimed his shotgun.
“Wait!” Keo shouted.
Norris glared at him. “What the hell for?”
“It can’t get through yet! If you shoot it—”
Loud rattling sounds from behind them cut him off. He spun around along with everyone else and saw the walls around the windows and doors shaking as the creatures outside began attacking the security gates and burglar bars. The desks in front of the doors shook and the vending machines vibrated against the two-pronged assault.
Keo wasn’t too worried about the doors and windows giving way, though. Even if the creatures could pull off the metal bars, there were the barricades to keep them back. No, he wasn’t worried about the things attacking the entrances. Despite the tumultuous rattling, it was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. He was worried about the ventilation system and the creature behind it. Because if there was one of those undead things back there, there were probably more.
“The back room!” Keo shouted. “Everyone into the back room now!”
“Lotte!” Gillian shouted and ran off somewhere into the darkness.
Keo tracked her with his flashlight until he heard the screeching of metal and knew the ventilation grill had finally surrendered. Before he could turn, a shotgun blast ripped through the lobby and something sticky and wet smacked him in the legs.
Norris was walking toward him, firing into the creature that had fallen out of the hole in the wall and was now flopping on the floor between them. Keo stumbled backward to keep from catching stray buckshot from Norris’s weapon as another blast tore just as many holes in the floor as it did the creature’s body.
And the damn thing didn’t stop moving.
Keo aimed at its head, the beam of his flashlight lighting it up in all its blackened and malformed glory. The undead thing scowled at him, one side of its face already gone, the jagged outline of its shattered skull torn apart by Norris’s buckshot. Keo fired and the rest of the thing’s head exploded like a ripe melon, leaving behind just the bottom half where the nose and mouth were.
And it still didn’t go down.
Norris had kept moving forward and he was almost on top of the thing when it whirled to confront him, “looking” at him with eyes that it no longer had. The sight of it, with the top part of its head shorn off, what’s left of its brain scattered over the floor like clumps of goop, was something Keo didn’t think he would ever forget.
Then Norris shot it almost point-blank in the chest, and the concussive force of the blow at such a short distance sent it sliding across the lobby and into the wall in a tangled mess of bony arms and legs. It lay against the wall for a second or two before it began unfurling itself and rising up again.
“Back room!” Keo shouted. “Get into the back room now!”
He turned in time to see Gillian racing across the lobby, pushing Lotte’s wheelchair in front of her. Rachel and Christine also ran past him, Rachel holding onto her daughter’s arm as the girl struggled with the suddenly slippery floor covered in pools of blood
(and flesh and brains)
the creature had left in its wake.
“Henry, Jake!” Norris shouted. “Get the fuck over here!”
Henry and Jake had Tori between them and they were rushing over from the other side of the room. They hadn’t gone more than a few feet when the creature turned its torso in their direction and launched its headless body at them. It slammed into Henry’s legs, bowling the older man off his feet, and took Tori right along with them.
“Tori!” Jake shouted.
Screams filled the lobby in tune to the relentless rattling of metal bars from outside the windows and doors to Keo’s right. He did everything possible to block them out. They were distractions, unimportant. What was happening inside the building was what mattered, was
all
that mattered. But telling himself that and following up on it wasn’t quite the same thing.
Jake’s flashlight scoured the room until its bright beam fell across Henry on the floor, the creature’s jaw clamped down on the back of his neck. Tori was nearby, screaming. Keo didn’t know whose screams were louder—Henry’s or Tori’s, or father and daughter combined.
Jake was running toward the bloody scene, the flashlight bouncing up and down as he switched his grip to his shotgun. More screaming, though now Keo couldn’t tell who it was coming from, and he didn’t have time to see what had happened because—
BOOM!
Norris was shooting behind him again, his Remington and flashlight pointed up at the square ventilation opening. His shotgun blast had widened the box, buckshot having torn chunks off the surrounding wall, and a creature was leaning out when a second blast from Norris’s weapon blew a hole in its chest. The creature looked annoyed just before it staggered out of the wall and plummeted, hitting the floor with a loud
clattering
of bones.
Norris racked his shotgun and was backing up just as another one of the monstrosities groped its way out of the opening. There was already another one—
no, two more—
behind it, waiting for their turn to come through.
Keo darted across the room, swerving around the creatures as they landed in front of him, the
clack-clack
of bones hitting the floor tiles somehow louder than even the shotgun blasts behind him.
Jake. Jake’s shooting. Sorry, kid.
Keo couldn’t worry about Jake anymore because one of the creatures spun on him, obsidian eyes glinting in the darkness. Keo shot it from less than a foot away, and large sections of its head came unglued and flew across the floor in a sea of brain and skull and blood (or what used to be blood).
One of ghoulish creatures swiped at him, but Keo sidestepped just in time, actually spinning on his heels like some ballet dancer.
Eat your heart out, Mikhail Baryshnikov!
He might have even cackled. Though, of course, it was impossible to hear anything over the roar of shotgun blasts from in front and behind him. Norris and Jake shooting, one after another, as if they had timed their fire. And there were Tori’s bloodcurdling screams, which seemed to go on and on and on…
Keo thought the creature would chase him, but instead it bounded into the darkness in the opposite direction—toward where Keo last saw Jake trying desperately to save his would-be father-in-law.
Run, Jake, run! Save yourself, kid!
He looked back, just as a flash of fire lit up the room, and in that same split-second, Keo made out Henry in a pool of blood and Jake trying to shake off one of the creatures clinging to his own back. Then Jake’s shotgun fired again and blew a hole in the wall—
and the top half of Tori’s head right along with it.
Keo stopped and stared for a good second, until the darkness overtook his vision again.
Oh, damn.
“Kid, come on!” Norris shouted behind him.
“Right behind you!” Keo shouted back, before turning and running.
He didn’t see where Gillian had gone and prayed she had run straight to the back room at the end of the hallway like they had agreed. His fingers were already busy instinctively reloading the shotgun as he ran past the sheriff’s office. He glimpsed Taylor and Aaron inside hiding behind the massive desk, so big that they couldn’t bring it outside to use on the doors.
“Run!” he shouted at them.
They stared back at him, clutching at the sides of the big oak furniture, faces barely visible in the semidarkness. He couldn’t tell if they were paralyzed with fear or if they couldn’t hear him over the screaming and shotguns blasts. Maybe both.
“See the world. Kill some people. Make some money.”
Yeah, right.
Then the two of them were gone, vanished from his peripheral vision, as Keo entered the hallway and kept going.
Sorry, kids, can’t help you now!
He concentrated on what was in front of him. The back hallway, and almost at the very end, the room with the now-empty gun rack and shelves fully stocked with bullets that had no weapons to load.
And the steel door.
His sneakers had a hard time gripping the floor as he ran. He didn’t know why until he remembered all the blood and brains and flesh he had stepped on and collected as he fled from the lobby. He was vaguely aware that he was reloading as he moved through the rectangular shaped darkness that was the hallway, the flashlight beam jolting left and right, then up and down, illuminating just enough to keep him from running straight into a wall.
Someone was moving behind him, shotgun blasting all the way. It was likely Norris. Keo had given up on Jake, and the chances of Aaron and Taylor making it out of the sheriff’s office was not even worth thinking about. To find out for sure, he would have to slow down and look back.
Keo ran full-speed down the hallway instead.
He saw the door up ahead, Gillian’s face temporarily lit up by his bouncing flashlight beam. She was at the door and holding it open with both hands, shouting something at him that he couldn’t hear over the roar of gunfire from less than a meter behind him.
Then, out of nowhere, a voice shouted, “I’m out, I’m out!”
Keo slid to a stop and spun around. “Run, old man, run!”
Norris’s face was contorted into a pained expression and there was sticky goo
(blood?)
clinging to his chest and face when Keo’s flashlight flashed across him. When the beam of light left him, Norris was swallowed up by the darkness, though Keo could still make out the large whites of his eyes as the ex-cop ran past him.
Then there was just the hallway and the quivering, moving mass of silhouetted creatures flooding into the narrow passageway in front of him, their deformed shapes partially lit by large pools of moonlight splashing across the lobby.
He fired, then backed up and fired again, racked, and fired again.
One shot…two shots…three…
Keo wasn’t aiming at their chests, which was the biggest part of them. Instead, he was gunning for their legs, because knocking them off their feet was the only thing that seemed to even slow them down.
Buckshot tore into their long spindly limbs, the strangely satisfying
crunch
of bones snapping at will. Sometimes he shot too high and shattered femurs, which was just as good.
“Keo!” from behind him.
Gillian
. “Come on!”
…four shots…five shots…
…six…
They fell over each other trying to get up the hallway at him. They slipped and slid on splattered and spraying blood, but all that did was delay them for a second, sometimes even less than that.
Daebak. I’m going to fucking die in this two-horse town.
Or worse.
He didn’t know where the hell they had come from, how so many had gotten into the station so fast. How many had been in the air ducts? A dozen? A hundred? It looked like
thousands
were now rushing toward him. So many that he couldn’t see the lobby behind them anymore, just little slivers of moonlight here and there, trying to pierce through a wall of death that was surging, stumbling, and crawling over the ones he had felled by taking out their legs.