Eric S. Brown (11 page)

Lori eased open the bedroom door. The hallway was clear. The smell of bacon still lingered in the air. “Do we make for the woods or the truck?”

“
The woods,” Thomas said firmly. “If we make it, we can always wait for the rotters to settle down and wander off. The truck will still be there when they do.”

“
Crap,” Lori said. Thomas followed her gaze, seeing that the front door leading into the living room was open. A fat, dead man came lumbering inside through it. He was shirtless and rolls of gray flesh jiggled with each step he took, shaking loose scores of the maggots crawling over him onto the floor. Thomas could see more rotters approaching in the yard. He resisted the urge to make some kind of snide remark like
they’re here.

“
Backdoor,” Lori said, apparently already far ahead of him. They raced down the stairs. The fat man caught sight of them and snarled, showing tobacco- and blood-stained teeth. Thomas dropped him with a burst to his head before he got close enough to be a threat. The noise of the shots drove the rotters outside into a frenzy. Thomas cursed himself for being too jumpy as a stream of the creatures poured through the open front door. Both Thomas and Lori were taken off guard as Elijah fell from where he’d been waiting for them on the ceiling into the rotters. His swords twirling, he sent the three rotters who had already made their way inside to Hell and kicked the front door shut with one of his heavy boots.

“
I believe we have some business to conclude,” he grinned at them.

Thomas clicked the AK-47 into full auto. Elijah was already moving as he squeezed the gun’s trigger. It chattered, spitting spent casing to clatter and roll across the floor.

Elijah jumped upwards, reattaching himself to the ceiling like some kind of bug. He skittered across it towards them with a speed too fast for Thomas to match. Lori was ready though. The blast from her shotgun tore away Elijah’s right arm at the elbow, causing him to lose his grip. His body thudded against the hard wood of the floor a few feet from where they stood.

“
Yeah!” Thomas howled. “Take that, you freak!”

Elijah’s left hand threw a knife before either of them saw it coming. The blade slashed Lori’s left arm deeply as it passed her. She screamed from the pain as the shotgun went flying from her hands. Thomas swung his AK-47, trying to get another shot at Elijah, but the freak was already gone. A trail of yellow blood led to the cellar door. Thomas heard it slam shut.

“
He’s locked himself in!” Thomas shouted.

“
Who cares?” Lori yelled. “Let’s get the heck of out of here!”

***

Again, he had faced the humans and again somehow they had beaten him at his own game. The woman’s shot was blind luck. It could have been nothing else. Elijah gripped the railing of the stairs as he half stumbled down them into the cellar. His yellow blood glowed in the shadows of the room. This time there was light but he paid no attention to that fact. His wound was too severe to fully heal. Not even his body could regrow an entire new hand. Elijah decided to cut his losses. No matter where on this filthy planet the humans fled, the rotters would be there, waiting. In the end, they would die. As he slumped against the cellar wall, he noticed the light and realized something was very, very wrong. The huge double doors of the cellar’s bulkhead, leading out to the house’s backyard, lay in pieces on the dirt floor. There was a deep, rumbling chuff nearby. It rode on a thick scent of musk that burned his nostrils.

The sasquatch.

He knew it was here, in the cellar with him. He craned his neck to glance at the rows of shelves near the rear of the cellar. The beast squatted there as motionless as a statue, its breathing steady and controlled. Like him, the beast appeared to be bloodied and exhausted. Trying to escape the rotters, it must have come here seeking shelter.

Elijah and the beast stared at each other, eyes of blackness meeting orbs of burning yellow. He slowly eased one of the pistols under his trench coat from its holster.
So close to going home,
he thought. He wrapped a finger around the trigger, trying to move quickly but quietly.

Then the beast roared, crawling on its hands and knees towards him because the cellar’s ceiling was too low for it to stand. Elijah’s first shot turned its right eye into pulp, leaving an empty socket and spouting blood in its place. He never had time to fire a second. A massive, hair-covered hand crushed his skull against the cement blocks of the wall behind him. The last thing Elijah heard was the sound of his own bones breaking and blood rushing outward to fill his ears.

***

Lori beat him into the kitchen but Thomas caught up to her as she skidded to a halt at the backdoor. Thomas saw the crumpled and twisted bodies of over twenty rotters strewn across the backyard. They had deep gouges in their faces. “The beast,” he panted, trying to catch his breath. His leg was killing him. He didn’t dare look at it. He knew what he would see. Thomas could feel fresh blood trickling along the length of his leg and the pool of warm liquid sloshing around in his boot. All the movement and the fighting had not only reopened the long gash running from the top of his boot to his knee but it felt like it had made it worse. He saw concern in Lori’s eyes as she looked at him. “If it’s out there, we’re dead. We can’t fight the rotters and it too,” he told her.

“
We’re dead already, Thomas.”

Thomas shook his head. “There’s always hope as long as we’re still breathing.”

“
You ready?” she asked.

“
No.” Thomas straightened himself up, standing as tall as he could on his wounded leg. “I’m not running anymore.”

“
We don’t have time for this,” Lori pleaded.

“
I mean it,” Thomas said, “This is my home. If I’m going to die, I’ll die here like my dad did.”

He could tell Lori didn’t know what to say.

“
Guess this is where we part ways then,” he said for her.

“
Guess so,” she said sadly. “Keep fighting, Thomas. Life is too precious just to give up on,” Lori told him, then she was gone through the backdoor. He didn’t bother to watch her running across the yard. Thomas loaded a fresh mag into his rifle. His plan was to make it upstairs to his bedroom again. There, he’d make his last stand. Either he would kill all the rotters in and around the house or he would run out of ammo and the things would finally get the meal they were after. What happened to him now was in God’s hand and he made his peace with that.

***

Lori sprinted for the trees. A handful of rotters emerged from them, racing to meet her. The less noise she made, the better so she took a page from Elijah’s book of tricks. A dead woman with a belly swollen and distended, either from gas or her last meal, came barreling at her. Lori swung her shotgun like a club. Its butt slammed into the side of the woman’s head with the cracking sound of fracturing bone. The woman rolled into the grass and lay there twitching as Lori ran past her. A snarling guy, dressed in National Guard combat fatigues, came at her from her side. She thrust the shotgun’s butt forward to meet his chin, shattering his jaw and sending him staggering backwards from the impact of the blow. Lori was only a few yards from the treeline when the beast came tearing out of the cellar beneath Thomas’ house with an earthshaking roar.

“
Frag me,” she muttered, pouring on all the extra speed her exhausted body could muster. It came bounding after her, crushing skulls and sweeping the remaining rotters from its path like they were nothing more than children’s toys. Lori ducked a low tree limb as she burst into the woods. She wasn’t so stupid as to think she could lose the beast in the trees like she had planned to do with the rotters. These woods were its home and it was a heck of a lot smarter and more cunning than those sacks of decaying meat on two legs. It was faster too. As she reached the fence that surrounded the farm, she knew she was going to have to stand and fight. She could hear the beast knocking over trees as it rushed through the woods after her. Pumping a fresh round into the shotgun’s chamber, she turned to face it. One of its huge hands was reaching for her. She noticed one of its eyes was gone, replaced by an empty socket. Blood still flowed from the wound, matting the beast’s hair to its cheek in a sticky mess of congealing red.

Lori sidestepped its extended hand, moving closer to the monster. The barrel of her shotgun made contact with the flesh of its throat as she pulled the trigger. The shotgun bucked in her hands as the point blank blast blew a gaping hole between the beast’s chin and its chest. The beast stopped, its breath wheezing through what remained of the windpipe dangling from the mangled mess of its throat. It raised one hand to cover the lethal wound, trying to stop the spray of blood that rained down over her where she stood under it. Its other hand caught her with a backhanded slap as she turned to run. She felt pain and something snap inside of her as the blow lifted her from her feet, sending her twisting through the air to land in the grass several feet away.

Lori lay on the ground, her top half facing one direction, her bottom half another, as she watched the beast collapse. A pool of blood forming around the beast’s unmoving head. Lori couldn’t feel her legs but the pain in her spine was so intense it was like hellfire melting away her flesh. She tried to right herself and roll fully over onto her back but the pain made it impossible. As the world began to spin around her and her vision blurred there was movement in the trees. A trio of rotters, either drawn to her by the noise of the shotgun’s blast or the smell of all the blood, closed in on her. She tried to scream as one grabbed her by her long hair, yanking her head to the side, but all that came out was a pathetic whimpering sound. She felt another of the creatures sink its teeth into her side, digging into the meat of her stomach as the first one tore a chunk of her shoulder away. The last thing Lori saw was the third rotter wandering away, carrying the gnawed-off lower part of one of her legs.

***

Thomas hosed the rotters in the living room on full auto, emptying his entire clip in a single stream of continuous fire. An elderly man missing most of his face took numerous rounds to his shoulders and chest, flopping over the couch. Thomas’ bullets splattered brain matter onto the wall from a topless, teenage blonde in a cheerleader’s skirt onto the room’s wall. A solider with his insides spilling from a hole in his gut spun to crash on top of the coffee table, taking more rounds than Thomas could even guess at. All around the room the dead fell. Only a few were put down permanently but all that mattered to Thomas was buying time. He popped out the empty clip, shoving in a new one as he limped for the stairs, leaving a trail of warm red from his wounded leg in his wake. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he hosed the entire area of the living room again until his rifle clicked empty once more. Thomas hauled his exhausted and hurting body up the steps as he loaded his last mag. More rotters were pouring through the open front door of the house. Thomas ignored them until he hit the top of the stairs. Only then did he turn to fire on them as they bounded up the steps after him. He spent over half his last clip buying some breathing room, sending the faster of the creatures tumbling down the steps to trip up and block the next wave behind them.

Thomas hobbled into his bedroom, slamming its door closed. He tossed his Ak-47 aside, snatching up a .38 revolver and a Glock from the pile of weapons on the bed. Shoving the remaining weapons out of his way, he plopped onto the edge of the bed. He paid no attention to the sound of dead fists pounding on the door as it shook in its frame. His leg was throbbing. Thomas shut his eyes and tried to push the pain from his mind. The plan was a simple one. He had plenty of weapons and ammo and the dead could only enter the bedroom one or two at a time. If he kept his cool and the blood loss from his leg didn’t get him, he should be able to kill the entire pack of the things that had followed them home. He guessed there were less than a hundred of the rotters and not all of them were inside the house yet. Steady, he told himself, you can do this, as the door rattled from the rotters’ continued attack on it.

Cracks formed and grew in the wood of the door. Finally, with a loud crash, it splintered and broke open. Thomas aimed his shots carefully. His first shot sent a punk kid in a Snoop Dog T-shirt back to Hell. His second sprayed brain matter and pus-like blood from the skull of a once hot redhead in a mini-skirt into the air. One after another, the rotters fell, creating a barricade of corpses that helped him by slowing down the ones trying to shove their way into the room over them. As soon as one gun clicked empty, Thomas discarded it, replacing it with another from the pile beside him on the bed. Soon the room was filled with gun smoke and the stench of blood and rotting entrails. The number of rotters at the door dwindled to where he could see past them into the hall.

Then, a high pitched screeching filled the room, coming from somewhere outside, above the roof of the house. It was so intense, Thomas had no choice but to drop his weapons and clasp his hands over his ears. Whatever it was, the noise was affecting the rotters as well. Thomas watched a woman missing her nose stop in the doorway of the bedroom, swaying back and forth, as black pus oozed from eyes and ears, as if the noise was crushing her brain inside her skull. The ceiling above him burst into flames, the heat so intense the wood disintegrated into tiny flecks of ash that drifted in the air, swirling about like black snow. Thomas looked through the hole in the ceiling, up into the sky. A gleaming, silver cylinder the size of a small plane hovered over the house. As he stared at it in horror, a wide beam of bright blue energy erupted from its center and speared down to encase him. Thomas screamed, trying to reach for another gun, then he was simply gone.