Out of the Dark: An apocalyptic thriller (24 page)

     “Keep low,” he advised as she passed him, and she gave him a nod to let him know she’d heard his hastily, quietly muttered advice.

     To the right of the house and in the back is where Austin’s voice had come from. Laura indeed stayed low, making less of a target of herself. As she was on the short side, anyway, she knew any attack aimed at her head would meet empty air. It was the way Sam had always told her to move in a dangerous situation. She hoped he trusted his teaching and her own instincts to allow her to take the lead.

     There was a bedroom on one side of the hallway and what appeared to be a study on the other. Laura saw Austin in the bedroom, backed into the closet by a brunette woman wearing powder blue scrubs and a face coated in the sick color of day-old blood.

     “Austin!” Laura cried, both to reassure the teen of their presence and to distract his attacker. The woman continued on, heedless of the other people who entered the room.

     Austin held the rabid nurse at bay with a wooden bedside table, which was apparently the only thing he’d been close enough to grab. Reaching around it, obviously lacking the sense to simply twist out from where she was stuck between its legs, the woman snapped and snarled, foaming bloody spittle as she bared her savage, inhuman teeth at him. Austin wept frantically, and Sam knew as soon as he entered the room that the woman being held precariously at bay with only a small wooden table was the teen’s mother.

     Knowing who Austin’s attacker was brought a whole new sense of worry and urgency to Sam, but he shoved it down, put a lid on it and said to Laura, “Get out of the way.” He raised the gun he carried, trying to keep it steady. Close quarters were no place for a stray shot.

     “No!” Austin gasped, though his mother ignored the weapon and kept trying to go for the throat of her only child.

     The teen moved, positioning himself in the way of Sam’s aim. Sam swore. “Austin, get the fuck out of the way!”

     He had no time to explain that whatever had control of his mother wasn’t going to stop its mad quest to tear into his flesh just because of a showy self-sacrifice. Chances were, if Austin fell in her defense, she’d eat him out of spite.

     Laura decided to solve the issue by moving behind the woman and smacking her as hard as she could with the flat side of the axe. Though she would’ve liked to hit her in the head, Austin’s mother moved enough to throw off the swing, which earned her a blow to the neck. It was jarring, but it didn’t stun her. Regardless, the contact gave Laura what she wanted: the woman spun away from Austin. Though Sam bringing out the gun should have been a threat, it hadn’t even drawn her attention. Laura getting physical with her own weapon had marked her as a threat, which was a more pressing matter than prey.

     Austin’s mother leapt at Laura, who stepped back and tried to give Sam the shot he needed.

     The room was too tight and there were too many people in it. Even though Laura had gotten her away from Austin, she’d given Sam almost no help in getting a better shot. Now she was too close to Laura. As Laura backpedaled to get away from Austin’s mother, she unwittingly brought the woman closer to Sam and Trevor and put herself right in the target line.

     “Shit,” Sam swore as he tried to move around closer to Austin. He attempted to readjust his aim every second he thought she was clear of the other people in the room.

     At hearing his voice, the nurse snarled in Sam’s direction. Now that her focus was off Austin, everyone else in the room had become fair game. Sam urged Trevor behind him, keeping his son’s hand in his own, which made him twist uncomfortably. The woman charged, and Sam wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way, shoot or do much else except brace for impact.

     Though he’d been a football player all through middle and high school, the woman hit him harder than any opposing player had ever been able to. She knocked the wind out of his lungs. The gun slipped from his hand. It toppled to the floor as Sam went down with the woman on top of him. Trevor managed to worm his way to the side of Sam so he didn’t get crushed by the dual weight of the adults, but Sam kept his grip as sturdy as steel even as he fell.

     Laura saw the gun; saw the woman atop her husband bare her teeth at his neck. She didn’t hesitate as she dropped her axe and grabbed Sam’s discarded weapon. She shot three times, all three into the woman’s center mass. The first shot tore into the middle of her back, breaking through part of her spine. The next two took her high in the chest. After the third shot, she went very still.

     Laura put the gun on Austin’s bed, angled away from the people in the room and went to the teen. Sobbing, Austin tried to twist out of Laura’s arms as she held him to her, murmuring apologies and soothing nonsense. She trusted Sam to see to himself and Trevor. Austin had no one, and Laura felt herself now the most responsible person for him.

     Sam pushed the body of the woman off of his chest, glad the blood spread had only affected him. Trevor was doing his best to achieve a fetal position; only hindered because Sam still gripped his hand.

     The nurse flopped over in a boneless way and Sam winced. Death had not softened the feral expression that had held possession of the woman’s face until the end. Her clawed hands were still curved in menace, her lips still pulled in a snarl over deformed and mutated teeth.

     Standing, Sam pulled Trevor with him and made sure he kept the boy turned away from the body on the floor.

     “Bring him out to the car as soon as you can get him to move,” Sam said, and his voice was as iron-like as his grip on his son’s hand. They needed to get moving and it needed to happen immediately.

     Leaving the house with Trevor, Sam got the both of them into the car before Austin was ready to be dragged out by Laura. At that point, he was near catatonic with sorrow and resignation.

     “We covered her on the bed,” Laura told Sam quietly as she reclaimed the driver’s seat of the truck. She’d put Austin in the Aveo with Amy and Melissa. He’d complied listlessly.

     “We need to get home right now,” Sam said. He couldn’t come to terms with what had happened in the house, with his inability to do what needed to be done to protect his family and the people that were his responsibility, as he had decided Austin was. Therefore, he needed action. Useful action.

     “Why?” Laura asked. Her tone was fearful. She didn’t look at Sam, because she was focusing on backing out after Amy and then taking the lead, but she’d heard the concern in his voice.

     “Because Austin’s mother wasn’t there when I took him from here yesterday,” Sam said quietly. He hoped Laura caught the implications.

     She knew why Sam wasn’t explaining any further. He didn’t want Trevor to be distressed any more than he’d had to be up until that point.

     Laura thought about it as she drove. When she’d previously thought about the corrupted, she’d considered them mindless, with no sense of anything beyond tearing and rending those different from themselves. They knew nothing of their past lives, nothing of those who loved them, nothing of what it meant to be human.

     But Austin’s mother returning to her home meant something beyond that. It meant there was more to the corrupted than violence and hunger. If Austin’s mother wasn’t an exception, the corrupted knew where easy prey could be found. They knew where home was.

     If one followed the train of logic, then Bill Atkinson–corrupted, if Shane was to be believed–knew his way to the Walker home. He knew where easy prey, prey that would hesitate to wound a loved one resided.

     Bill could get to the Walker house.

     They needed to get home, Laura agreed grimly as she accelerated. They needed to pack the rest of their things and get away from the city. Immediately.

Chapter Nineteen

Armani’s Journal

     I found this little leather bound journal in the first store we looted for supplies–we’re already running out of those, though. The first few pages tell me it belonged to one of the cashiers. Didn’t she have better things to do than write in a pretty little book while she was on shift? Oh, well. It felt right to take it, right that it was left by the third shift employee who was probably claimed by this sickness as it swept across our home in the middle of the night. What happened to her, I wonder? I know I won’t ever find out…

     We have a three vehicle caravan; a makeshift lot, really. My car leads it; another follows and then in the back is a bus we commandeered from a church. I don’t think anyone will need a ride to service anymore. There are nine people with me so far. My only goal is to stay on the road, to stay alive…

     Armani finished writing as soon as the three people he’d sent to manufacture barricades returned to report to him. Though women, the attractive couple of Gwen and Molly Read were physically among the strongest of Armani’s group and they had not once shied away from manual labor. With them were the youngest of the men, Eric Harper and a man who addressed himself only as Kirby. Armani didn’t quibble with him about the name. In the wake of tragedy that had followed the Onset, Armani himself had shed his old life and name. He didn’t even want how he was addressed to remind him of what he once was. That would inevitably lead to what he had done.

     Kirby had sandy hair and quick brown eyes too wide for his face. It lent him a childish appearance, which wasn’t helped by the fact that he stood at only 5’2” and was lean with underdeveloped muscle. He reminded Armani of a whipped dog, especially when placed beside the bear of a man that was Eric Harper. Eric–dark of hair, dark of eye, and bronze of skin–was a bodybuilder. He was a man devoted to the gods of sweat and gym memberships. He’d been a constant user of vitamin supplements and protein drinks, pre-workout energy pops and cleansers for after. He could’ve broken Kirby in half with one hand. The two had worked out an unexpected camaraderie, however, and rarely did anything outside of the other’s company. It made Armani glad to see his group working well together, and he said as much as they approached.

     “Darkness has nothing on you guys,” he commented admiringly. “Sun’s just barely started to set and we’re already locked up snug, right?”

     “Aye, cap,” Kirby said, tipping an imaginary hat toward Armani. Eric grinned at him and added, “This place was simple to lock down, Armani. Must’ve been a construction company of some kind. There were all sorts of things to use for barricades, and all the tools we needed, too. I think the only thing we didn’t close up tight was the bathroom window, but it’s too tiny for anyone older than seven to squeeze through.”

     Armani frowned and shook his head. He stood and replaced a little journal on the desk he’d been sitting at.

     “We’ve all seen enough to know we need to take every precaution,” he said gently, not reproachfully as he moved toward the bathroom.

     The office, which was the part of the building Armani’s crew had barricaded off, was attached to a large garage through a single door. Not only had Armani ordered the garage searched top to bottom before nightfall, the doors were locked and bolted as securely as could be managed before the inner office door leading out had received the same treatment. There was one other entrance and that too had been barricaded soundly. Within the office there was a main room with three desks squeezed into the space as well as could be managed, and then a separate room with another desk and two filing cabinets inside. They had shoved everything into one corner of the main room, in hopes that it would provide them enough space once they brought in all the blankets and bedding to sleep in shifts. Armani wanted one guard on each door, so that meant two awake while the other eight slept at any given time. Sentries that didn’t get enough rest during the night were able to sleep in the vehicles the next day. He was confident the plan would work well for the time being.

     The bathroom was the only other room in the office, and it would have been laughable as a closet. It was a tiny, tight room with a commode, a standing sink, and two cabinets sunk into the wall for storage. Armani was surprised to see that on the wall with the tall cabinet, a small shower was tucked into the corner. It was a compact, professional usage of space.

     Eric had been right about the window: it was miniature with a front plane of glass that rolled outward by use of a handle that turned to control the movement. Though the outer pane of glass was pressed tight up to the inner screen, Armani could see a small percentage of the outside world through the wooden frame.

     There was a tall, hoary pine that towered above the office, a tree that had definitely been in its place longer than the building it stood beside. Aside from the sky, which now suffered only the faintest tint from the coloring of the setting sun, the old tree was the only thing Armani could see. Due to lack of needles, the thick, twisted trunk and all of its limbs were easy to define. Looking at it too long, Armani became convinced that parts of what he saw weren’t tree limbs at all, but the appendages of some horrific creature– something arachnid in appearance–that had simply molded itself against the tree until it could move about freely in this, the second night of what was surely the Apocalypse. He thought he saw movement, some insectile shifting, and that was enough for him.

     “Board it up,” he said grimly. “We have the supplies for it. Don’t leave anything open.”