TORMENT (16 page)

She moved to the stairs, pulling Liz with her. Garbarino stood in front of her, blocking her way. “And what will you be doing, fearless leader?”

Mia took her handgun out and chambered a round. Garbarino stepped back and tensed. She saw the gun in his hand slowly rising. “If you’ll get out of my way, I’m going to go make sure there isn’t an army of people upstairs waiting to kill us once we’ve barricaded ourselves in.”

The idea that someone could already be in the house hit Garbarino hard. He stepped aside and motioned for Paul to follow him.

As Mia stormed up the stairs with Liz in tow, she heard furniture moving behind her. She stopped at the second floor and looked down at Liz. The girl wore a large smile. “What?”

“You cursed,” she said.
“A lot.”

Mia let out a small laugh. “Yeah, I did.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Mia said. “I was angry.”

“Mommy said that swear words aren’t really bad.
It’s
society that says they’re bad. But they’re still just words. And most of the time they make people smile.”

Mia laughed again. It sounded like something Margo would say.

“But now,” Liz said, “Everyone is dead. So we can decide what’s okay to say, right?”

Mia felt wrong smiling, but couldn’t help it. “I suppose. But what if the others disagree?”

Liz stood quiet for a moment, pondering the question. Then she shrugged. “Fuck ’em.”

Covering her mouth, Mia laughed hard, but stopped just as abruptly. She held the gun up. Liz went silent and fell in behind her. She’d heard it too.
Footsteps.
Above them.

Someone was home.

20

“Stay here,” Mia whispered to Liz. She’d quickly checked the second floor bedrooms and deposited Liz in a closet. The girl shuffled back into the closest, hidden behind a rack of hanging suits that must have come from a Big n’ Tall store.

The stairs to the third floor were at the center of the hall and ended at a closed door. A thick, beige carpet covered the steps and concealed her approach. She paused at the top of the stairs, trying to remember how police officers breached a room, but then realized every image she had of the maneuver was from a TV show.

With her left hand on the door knob and the gun in her right, she slowly turned the handle and nudged the door open. Other than the bottom of the door brushing against the carpet, she managed complete silence.

The third floor was one large room. Four skylights above and a large, front looking window filled the room with the tangerine glow of the setting sun. She searched the long room for any sign of the person she’d heard and found nothing. There were two arcade games; the screens blank. A mini-bar filled the back corner accompanied by a card table and dart board on the wall. The front half of the room held two plush couches and a TV screen that looked big enough to service a stadium theater. But the centerpiece of the room was a pool table. Ornately carved from red oak, the table sat at the center of the space. A large stained glass fixture hung above it.

The most interesting thing about the pool table was what lay on the side.

A bullet.

Her bullet.

She walked toward the round, staring at it. “Austin?”

“Didn’t want you to shoot me.”
Austin’s voice came from behind her. A small bathroom was hidden behind the stairs. He stepped out, wiping off his face with a hand towel.

She wanted to leap at the man and hug him. Having written him off as dead, she felt glad to see him. She lowered her gun.

He walked to the pool table and picked up the round. “Thanks for the message. I came in through the fire escape after checking out the backyard.”

“How did you get here so fast?” she asked.

He took out a pool ball and rolled it across the table, bouncing it off the cushion. “I wasn’t that far behind. Wanted to make sure you weren’t being followed.”

“You were watching us?”

He nodded. “I was in the woods behind the house.”

“Could’a told me.”

“Worried?” he asked with a grin.

“Asshole.”

Austin laughed and looked beyond her. Liz was standing there. He stopped smiling.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Austin. We decided that curse words weren’t offensive anymore,” Liz said as she entered the room and sat on a couch.

“I told you to wait,” Mia said, a touch of anger in her voice.

Liz shrugged. “I thought it was safe to come out with them.” She thumbed over her shoulder as Mark arrived, carrying a novel. Paul and Chang followed him, also carrying novels.

“There a book club I don’t know about?” Austin asked.

“Only form of entertainment that’s not going to get us killed,” Mark said.

“Running for your life isn’t entertaining enough?” Mia asked.

“Food’s here,” Collins announced as he entered carrying two brown bags full of non-perishable food.

White and Vanderwarf
followed,
hands empty. Garbarino was last. He closed and locked the door at the bottom of the stairs then joined them at the top. He looked honestly pleased to see Austin. “You made it.”

Austin stopped the rolling pool ball. “One almost got me.
Snuck up behind me while I was distracted.”

“Were they armed?” Garbarino asked.

Austin shook his head. “They were...insane. No weapons.
Came at me with hands and teeth.
Like animals. A few of them weren’t any trouble. But if I wasn’t armed...or if the rest of them showed up.” He shook his head again, this time looking at the floor.
“Wouldn’t have turned out the same.”

After a moment of silence, he moved to the end of the pool table and reached under it. He motioned to Garbarino. “Help me on this end.
Vanderwarf.
White.
Get the other side.”

Together, the four of them moved the heavy table in front of the fire escape door on the side of the house. With the downstairs sealed, the second floor door locked and the pool table blocking the only other exit, they were sealed in tight.

As night settled, the group ate boxes of Hostess comfort food, spoke little, and one by one dropped off to sleep. Vanderwarf and White lay down behind the bar. No one could see
them,
everyone knew the two were dealing with the destruction of the world in their own, primal way.

“Going to have to start repopulating the planet sooner or later,” Paul had whispered to Mark, but the priest wasn’t laughing. Despite his normally humorous personality, he had fallen more serious as the sun descended and the sunset turned blood red. But if darkness filled his thoughts, he kept it to himself and eventually nodded off. Paul slept on one of the couches, snoring lightly. Chang had found a bean bag chair and fell asleep halfway on, lying on her back with her head cocked back and her mouth wide open. Collins fell asleep as he often did in the Oval Office, head down on the table. He’d started playing solitaire, but wasn’t having any luck.

Liz fell asleep on Mia’s lap while she sat in a comfortable chair to the side of the front window. Had it not been pitch black outside, it would have offered her a view of half the neighborhood for nearly a mile. Austin sat on a stool across from her, arms folded across his chest keeping watch in the other direction.

“Strange, isn’t it?” he said quietly.

“What is?” she replied.

“That sound.”

She listened, but could only hear the breathing of several sleeping people and Paul’s snoring. “I can’t hear anything.”

Austin picked up a pillow from the arm of the couch and tossed it at Paul. The man snorted, rolled over and fell quiet. “Outside,” Austin said.

She reached forward slowly and opened the small window. She held her breath and listened. At first she heard nothing. But after a few moments she heard...something. High pitched.
Reverberating.
Very distant.
“What is it?” she asked.

“Screaming,” he said.

Goose bumps sprung up on her arms. He was right. Once he identified the sound, she could hear it for what it was—screaming, from hundreds, if not thousands of people. “What’s going on out there?” she asked.

As though in reply, a light outside clicked on.

Austin sprang up.

Mia gasped.

“Motion sensitive light in the driveway,” he said.
“Must have a battery backup.”

She heard nothing but “motion sensitive.” Someone lurked outside. She shifted for a view of the driveway and saw a man. He moved quickly, but not in a single direction. Like a squirrel in the road, unsure of which way to run from an approaching car, he leaped one way and then the other. She could hear his panicked breathing, squeaking with fear.

“Should we help him?” she asked.

Austin shook his head, no. Instead, he whispered, “Close your window.”

She did so, quickly and quietly, careful not to jostle Liz and wake her up.

“I don’t think he could have heard us.”

“It’s not him I’m worried about.” He motioned to the others. “It’s them. I don’t want them to wake up. I don’t want them to see.”

“See what?”

“You didn’t hear the voices?”

She shook her head, wondering if her hearing sucked or if Austin just had really good ears.

“The people who attacked me.
Who attacked
Reggie.
They all shouted warnings first.
Apologies.
Like they didn’t want to be doing what they were about to do.
Like it horrified them.
I could hear them coming.” He motioned out the window. “And so can
he
.”

The man was still running in circles. Then, through the closed windows, Mia did hear another voice.
A woman’s.
Then a man’s.
She couldn’t make out the words, but she could see them. Running shadows.
Three of them.

The panicked man finally saw them coming.
Or maybe heard them.
And turned to run in the opposite direction.
But he was so out of his head with fright that he turned and sprinted into a tree. The three descended on top of him before he could stand. The woman went for his neck with her teeth, cutting off his scream. The two men tore at his stomach. Blood pooled around him as they slaughtered the man.

From beginning to end, the attack lasted only fifteen seconds. The two men and the woman stood above the body, wailing. Crying like children. They disappeared into the night again, leaving the dead man behind, his entrails looping over the driveway, his blood glowing bright red under the halogen glow of the motion sensitive light.

Mia and Austin stared down at the body in silence.

When the light blinked out again, Austin whispered, “We’ll go out the back in the morning. Get some sleep.”

She thought sleep would be impossible, but she sat back, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the view of stars outside had been replaced by blue sky. For a moment, lost in the comfortable place between sleep and reality, she forgot everything that had happened.