In all my travels with Matt and Carla, I’d never come across darkness quite like this.
Even with the partial moonlight, shadows clung to the trees like moss, the gnarled trunks thick and close around the narrow deer trails. Our red lights barely pierced the inky veil for more than a few yards, and every time I turned my back, I could almost feel hundreds of eyes watching us as we wandered through the countryside. Mud squelched under my shoes, and mosquitos whined in my ears. Minutes stretched into hours, and I wondered constantly how far we’d walked, but didn’t want to break the tense silence to ask.
Five miles in, the forest opened up to reveal vast fields of short, blackened stubble and skeletal dead trees where, according to Chris, wildfires had raged uncontested, since there were no firefighters left to stop them. When I asked how he knew, Chris paused long enough to check the army-surplus bandage wrapped around the cut on his arm.
“Planes.” He whispered, trying to keep his voice low, and tugging the gauze tighter over his skin. “With the Breach screwing up electronics in high-altitude zones, they’re basically flying bombs full of fuel, and they either crash, or ELSAR shoots them down. The first five days after I landed, I watched three different planes drop like flies, and there were fires burning on the horizon every night.”
Noticing him struggling with the twisted bandage, I dared to sidle closer, and smoothed it flat as best I could. “You were a pilot?”
Chris nodded, and when my hand brushed his arm, I could have sworn he blushed, though with the red light of our headlamps, I couldn’t be sure. “I flew a helicopter for a charter company based out of Pittsburgh. Somehow, I found this place during my last supply run, and ELSAR shot me out of the sky. Spent two weeks in the woods by myself before I ran into a patrol from New Wilderness.”
I almost tripped over a rock, both confused, and stunned. “Two weeks? How could anyone last that long out here?”
“It’s actually not that hard.” Chris pushed aside some thorns with the Kalashnikov, holding them back so Jamie and I could slip by. “Don’t make a lot of noise, never cook food where you sleep, hide your scent any way you can, that sort of thing. I thought that the big creatures would be the worst, but turns out, they were pretty easy to predict. It’s the little buggers, the stuff our size and smaller that are the most dangerous.”
We moved into an area where the grass grew tall, almost chest height or more. A few cars rested on the distant gravel road, ruined hulks with scraps of torn clothing near fly-covered piles of rotting flesh to indicate where their owners had fallen. Far off between the trees, I could sometimes glimpse the reflection of the pale moon off water and a low hush tickled my ears, like the crashing of waves.
“Is that the lake?” I risked tapping Jamie on the shoulder to whisper into her ear.
She cocked her head to one side and listened, and the pale skin on her throat bobbed in a nervous swallow. “I don’t know. Maple Lake should be miles from here . . . and it was never big enough for waves.”
Our march resumed, and I suppressed a shiver as we tramped along.
Did we fall off the edge of the earth or something?
Ahead, Chris stopped, his entire body rigid.
I copied him, my eyes on his back, waiting for him to move.
He waved down toward the ground, and crouched into the concealment of the tall weeds, rifle at the ready.
Needles of cold pricked my spine, but I did the same, and crawled beside Jamie to Chris, the three of us staring through the foliage with suspicious eyes.
Square and foreign amongst the wispy clouds of fog, the house stood in silence, save for the wind rustling at a loose shutter, the crickets singing in ignorant chorus. A traditional two-story white farmhouse, it had a front porch that boasted a porch swing, and the adjacent barn with red paint that peeled like dead skin from a sunburn. The overgrown lawn had bits of loose trash caught in its weedy clutches, and the dark windows gaped without a light to be seen. In the driveway, a red pickup truck with a ‘wishin I was fishin’ sticker sat facing the county road.
With a muted click, Chris thumbed down the safety on the Kalashnikov and scanned the surrounding area.
“Looks empty.” He turned his head to crack his neck in a way that reminded me of Matt, though without the false bravado. “I’d say no one’s home.”
“So, they just left their nice shiny truck?” Jamie gripped her Beretta and eyed the dark windows with a doubtful glare. “They might have scattered the trash to make it look like this place has already been picked over. We should keep moving.”
Chris pointed to the truck, his eyes jumping back and forth from it to the house. “See the grass grown up around the tires? It hasn’t moved in a while. They either had a second car and already left or didn’t make it out.”
Goosebumps rose on my skin at the implications of those words, and I checked behind us just to be sure nothing had followed. “Do we have to go in there?”
“We need cover.” He squinted for a moment against the shadows, and Chris seemed to convince himself that the building was in fact empty. “If we barricade ourselves inside and wait till morning, we can move in sunlight. Less chance of getting lost, less freaks to run into. Besides, there might be stuff in there we could use.”
On that, I had to agree. Our supplies were pitiful, since the tumble from the cliff had managed to throw most of our gear and rations into oblivion, and we only had enough food to last a day at best. Drinking water was hardly any better since, despite the canteens strapped to our sides or in our packs, we’d one through much of it in the hike through the forest. We needed to hide, to rest, and if possible, to scrounge something more to help us along.
I shifted on the balls of my feet and tried to stretch a cramp in one of my calves.
Maybe he’s right. At least we’d be inside, away from all this. Who knows, maybe the shower in there still works.
Jamie ground her teeth and leaned on her good elbow to throw Chris a disapproving frown. “Puppets love places like this. There could be dozens holed up in there, or Speaker Crabs, or a Brain Shredder, not to mention an ELSAR recon patrol—”
“I know, Jamie.” Chris’s tone held some bite to it, and I eyed the bandage on his arm, wondering how much his wound bothered him. He’d never snapped at either of us before. “But we need the rest. We planned on a quick op, which means now that it’s multi-day, we’ve got to reset our sleep schedule, or we’ll be exhausted come nightfall tomorrow.”
Jamie hesitated, her eyes searching his face, as if waiting for something that never came.
Instead, she sighed, and avoided his gaze with a curt nod. “Okay, I’ll take point.”
Chris shook his head, but Jamie waved her pistol in the grass. “Come on, at least let me do that. I’m not broken, I can still shoot, and if it really is empty, then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
His glare told me that Chris would rather have argued, but he let both shoulders slacken in defeat, and turned to me. “Red lights till we get there, white lights inside. We clear the rooms, you watch our backs. If I tell you to run, you do it. Understand?”
Having zero doubts in my abilities to run like a maniac the first time something jumped out at me, I nodded. “Sure.”
Behind the others, I crept forward and pressed myself to the wall of the farmhouse like a soldier in a black and white documentary. Chris and Jamie led the way, casting tense glances over their shoulders with every step. Part of me was glad I wasn’t the first one going in, as my brief room-clearing lessons with Jamie had taught me that the first man in the door usually died. The other part of me felt ten times worse for having to watch the rear, since I would be the only thing standing between my friends, and the unknown. If I failed, missed a movement in the grass, or a shadow in the trees, we could all die in seconds.
Flexing my fingers on the grip of my submachine gun, I pushed the little selector switch to auto, and stared down the sights at the woods behind us.
Finger off the trigger, both eyes open, scan your sector. You can do this, you can do this, come on.
At the porch, Chris moved from the wall to stand in front of the ricket door.
Crack.
His boot met the wood and splintered it, the front door flying open.
In a flash, Chris flicked the Kalashnikov’s flashlight on, and charged through the threshold. Jamie went hot on his heels, and I stopped inside the door to crouch facing out into the night.
One thousand one.
A floorboard creaked somewhere behind me, and I fought the urge to spin around and check. I had to trust Chris and Jamie to watch my back . . . like they were trusting me to watch theirs.
One thousand two.
Jamie whispered something inaudible to Chris, and a door squealed open on rusted hinges.
One thousand three.
I opened my eyes as wide as I could and tried to suck in any amount of light or movement from the outside. Cricket chirped from the bushes, the tall grass swayed in the breeze, and an owl swooped through the treetops near the barn.
“Clear.” Jamie called in a shushed voice from the darkness.
My muscles turned to butter, and I let out a long breath. Standing, I jammed the front door shut as best I could and allowed myself to turn around.
I stood in a dusty living room, an open kitchen to my left, decorated with a brown wooden table surrounded by four chairs and a retro-style yellow refrigerator. A soft-looking gray couch and modest black TV occupied the living room, and though much of the furniture bore chips and scratches in the finish, it had the homey feel of a place that had been lived in for years. Pictures smiled back at me from the walls above the fireplace, a bearded man in his mid-forties, a round-faced blonde woman of similar age, and two little girls holding a golden retriever between them on the porch, the American flag hanging in in the background. A pink bicycle helmet lay by the ruined front door, along with two baseball bats, a dog leash, and a pair of polka-dot roller skates.
A deep, painful melancholy tugged at my heart, and I knelt to pick one of the skates up.
So small. Did they take turns on the porch since there’s no concrete anywhere close? Was one better at it than the other?
It reminded me a lot of my house in Louisville, with its various imperfections brought on by years of spilled glasses, dropped items, and rearranged furniture bumping into walls. This place had been their safe haven, their tiny wooden-floored piece of the American dream, and now . . . now it was a nightmare.
The white gleam of my headlamp caught a flash of red, and I stiffened. “Guys, there’s—”
“I know.” Jamie shone her light at it, her head hung low. “We saw.”
A dried rusty-red pool lay near the center of the living room, with smears and dribbles leading into the hallway, and up a steep set of stairs. It started near one of the living room windows, which had been smashed inward, and the glass mixed with the blood in square, crystalline chunks. Several spent plastic shotgun shells lay in the narrow hallway and following them in sinister long strides were dozens of muddy, reptilian tracks, with slashes on the wall to show where the beasts had pulled themselves through the gap with their claws. They were huge, each track the size of an extra-large pizza, and some almost resembled knuckles, as if the creatures walked on their fists like gorillas.
“Birch Crawlers.” Chris pointed the AK down the hall, his shoulders hunched. “Likely a few younger males scouting for their pack.”
“You think they’re still here?” I stared at the blood, wondering how long someone would last after losing what looked like gallons all over the scratched hardwood floorboards.
“Crawlers always come back to the site of a good kill.” Jamie glanced over her shoulder in reflex, her face sheet white.
Chris reached up to switch his headlamp to its brightest setting and headed for the stairs. “Stick close.”
Each stairstep creaked and groaned under my shoes with dry complaint, and I gritted my teeth, my heart pounding. Mud and blood were crusted all over the dark oak woodwork, and I passed a smeary handprint on the wall, as if someone had tried to steady themselves on a desperate flight upwards, another red shotgun shell lying in the corner of the step. I could almost hear it in my mind, the screams of the wife and girls as they ran, smelled the burned cordite from the twelve gauge, and felt the shudder of the floor as the monsters hauled themselves up the stairs with rabid glee. I imagined the agonized groans of the man as he dragged himself upward, terrified of what pursued him, but desperate to defend what fled ahead of him.
Maybe they escaped? Maybe they jumped out a window, ran to a car, and sped off? Maybe they—
A foul, sour odor hit me full in the face as I crested the top of the stairs, and I forced back a gag.
The man lay with his remaining arm stretched toward the end of a narrow hallway, blood and dried clumps of flesh spattered everywhere. His bones gleamed yellow in the light of my headlamp, and shredded purple muscles hung from his shattered torso, the stump of his spine protruding where the lower back should have been. I could taste his sickly-sweet rot on the back of my tongue, the stench heavy in the air, and flies hummed with macabre delight all around his wounds. A shotgun sat not far off, its pump racked to the rear, empty, with half a dozen empty shells lying around the floor. Broken shards of bone and a lone finger that still bore a gold wedding band stuck to the greasy floorboards, and his eyes stared down the hallway with hazy, sightless mourning.
Next to him, a horrendous gray mound of smooth skin curled up with rigor mortis, the elongated head arched back from where a shotgun blast had finished it off, gooey black viscera sprayed across the wall. Another had died a few feet further into the landing, both with long reptilian skulls shaped like fallen logs, eyeless, the backs of their heads ringed with twig-like fringes forming a macabre crown. They bore wicked curved claws on their feet, the forelegs more muscled and ape-like than the rear ones, and neither creature had a tail.
One of them had a child’s shoe hanging from its jagged teeth.
I clapped one hand to my mouth and shut my eyes tight.
No, no, no.
“Told you.” Jamie’s eyes watered, though I suspected it wasn’t all from the stench, and she turned her head away from the dead man. “There’s a reason we never get any radio calls from this side of the ridge.”
Ignoring her, Chris knelt by the man, and produced a set of blue latex gloves from his war belt, which he tugged over his fingers. “It’s an old kill, a few days at least. See how the blood’s clotted? And there’s mold starting on the freaks.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Jamie paced back and forth to check down the stairs. “We’re in their hunting grounds. We should leave, now.”
With the care of a bomb-technician, Chris picked through the shirt pockets of the dead man and found nothing. “Crawlers range for miles. With a kill this old, they could be halfway across the county by now.”
“Or a few miles away.” Glowering at him, Jamie blinked as a tear made it past her eye and pointed to the dead man in bitterness. “This was a stupid idea, we should never have—”
Thump.
Everyone froze, and I swung my head to look down the narrow, shadowy hallway. Three doors lined it, one on the left, another on the right, and a third at the end of the corridor, facing me. This door hung on twisted hinges, the wood scarred with claw marks, and shards of moonlight poured through the gap.
Thump.
Again, it came, a wet collision of something dense and soft falling to woodwork that made my bowels convulse in primal dread.
Chris never took his eyes off the door and raised a gloved finger to point back the way we’d come. “Get behind me.”
Any other time, Jamie would have stood nose-to-nose arguing with someone who told her to take second place, but this time she did as she was told. The pistol in her hand shook like a leaf, Jamie’s breath coming in short, shallow draws, and the way she shuffled close to Chris, like he was a shield, sent chills down my back.
My knees almost knocked together, and I swiveled my head to look behind me.
Nothing, save for shadows, blood, and muddy monster tracks.
I want to go home. I want to wake up in my bed and have this all be a dream. I want to go home.
Summoning all my willpower, I put on foot in front of the other, and trailed Jamie down the hallway.
Pausing by the door, the three of us waited, listening.
Thump.
With the sound just on the other side of the shattered door, Chris drew a shaky breath and stepped back.
I nudged the selector switch on my gun to auto and swallowed hard.
Crash.
The door caved in, and I dove through the gap behind the other two. Down the sights of my submachine gun, a burst of black soared through the air, and my brain screamed at me to pull the trigger. Noise erupted against my eardrums, shocking and loud in this tomb-like place. Everything blurred by in an avalanche of color under our white lights, and I tasted blood on the air.
I can’t see. It’s moving too fast, where did it go? I can’t see what is it, what is it?
In the next second, three fat crows flew out a nearby broken window, cawing in alarm. A few ebony feathers drifted to the floor in their wake, among the dust, mold, and broken glass. Everything in the room had been ripped apart, the bed overturned, the wardrobe tipped over, the dresser smashed to splinters, but aside from that, it all stood in eerie silence.
Chris’s shoulders slumped and he let out a long sigh. “Clear.”
I lowered my Type-9, and relief flooded through me, so sweet I wanted to cry. No monsters. We could relax for a while, maybe wait until sunrise, and then . . .
The beam of light from my headlamp reflected off something grayish-white, and all my hopes were dashed.
The woman had obviously tried to barricade the door, broken pieces of a chair and a snapped golf club lying next to her torn body. Her stomach lay ripped open, the ropy guts strewn out from where the crows had gorged themselves, bits of skin thrown everywhere. Like an eggshell under some immense weight, her head had been crushed, and the woman’s lower jaw was missing, all that remained being a ragged, bloody hole in her throat. Gnats and flies heaved inside her wounds with a degenerate hum of wings, accompanied by a carpet of wriggling white maggots that bored miniature tunnels through the decaying flesh. Nearby, a little leg stuck out from under the overturned bedstead, swollen and motionless in a swathe of dried blood. A hazy eyeball lay discarded near the window, likely dropped by the crows, with torn optic nerves still spiderwebbed over the back of the greasy orb. On the other end of the upside-down bed, a matted, bloody clump of brown hair ended in a tiny braid, with a unicorn hair barrette clipped among the tresses.
Something tightened in my chest, a harsh, painful twist that wouldn’t stop, and I blinked hard at tears that welled in my eyes. I’d known that people had died, Jamie told me as much on my first day, but I’d never really seen it up close.
Not fresh.
Not like this.
“Kids didn’t stand a chance.” Jamie wiped at her eyes at the foot of the overturned bed. “The evil freaks didn’t even bother to eat them. They just killed for no reason.”
Chris walked around her and peered down at the dead girls, his face a mask of stone. “They had a reason. See the blood smears on the walls, the floor? They dragged the girls from the under bed, killed them with the mother, and then stashed them back in their original hiding spot. It wasn’t random, it was deliberate.”
“Exactly.” Jamie glanced at the dead mother and holstered her Beretta. “They enjoy being cruel. The soulless creeps hate us.”
“They don’t hate us.” Chris nudged at a gouge in the floor with his boot, the splinters of oak still damp with crimson splashes. “They don’t feel emotions like we do. This was strategic on their part, eliminating competition, establishing territory . . . storing food.”
I couldn’t help but gape at him, stunned, both by Chris’s callous words.
You’d think he was talking about ants in the kitchen.
Her green eyes afire with emotion, Jamie spun on her heel to jab a finger in his face. “Is this some kind of twisted nature hike to you? Who cares what they feel, they’re monsters. What kind of psycho—”
“Survival.” Chris stepped to be nose-to-nose with her, and his impassive look slipped into a frown that teased with growing anger. “That’s what this is to me, Jamie. Crawlers can recognize behavioral patterns, they knew where to look for the girls, because they understand that we always hide the little ones first. All they know is survival, and if we want to beat them, we have to think that way too.”
Jamie opened her mouth to reply, but swayed a little on her feet, and brought a hand to her forehead with a grimace of pain.
My eyes met Chris’s gaze, and his anger seemed to melt into concern.
That’s why she’s being so combative.
“It’s your head, isn’t it?” I pulled the canteen from my belt and offered it to her. “Here, maybe you should sit down, and . . .”
With another barely concealed stumble, Jamie waved me off, and marched back out the door into the hall. “I’m fine, okay? It’s nothing. Look, you guys do whatever you want, but I’m not staying up here with . . . with them.”
Left alone with Chris, I cradled my submachine gun under on arm, and found his sky-blue irises on me once again. “So, what now? Are we seriously staying here tonight?”
Chris shrugged off his pack, leaned the AK against it, and pulled a wadded-up sheet from the bed. “No. Jamie was right, we’ll have to move on since there’s a food-cache here for the Crawlers. There’s no telling when they’ll be back, but we can’t take that chance.”
He draped the bloody sheet across the mother’s corpse and tucked it in around her shattered limbs with a gentleness that surprised me. Chris smoothed what remained of the woman’s hair along her broken skull, and crossed her arms over her chest, keeping every part of himself away from the blood save for his gloves.
Catching my stare, Chris jerked his head at the little foot that stuck out from under the bed. “They belong beside their mother and father. You don’t have to watch if you don’t want to.”
I looked into his eyes, saw the pain, the weariness, and a sadness barely masked by a rigid poker-face that had enraged Jamie so much. It reminded me of the way all the old veterans looked during our school assembly for Veterans’ Day, a distant somberness that made him appear so much older than he likely was. It occurred to me that perhaps Chris had never really been the same person after those two weeks alone in the wild, certainly not if this sort of carnage had been the norm. How many bodies had he seen, how many ruined houses, abandoned cars, and falling airplanes? All of it, he’d experienced alone . . . and he’d accepted it.
Not this time.
My backpack slid off my shoulders, and I slung my submachine gun over one shoulder to kneel beside him. “Show me what I need to do.”
The corners of Chris’s mouth almost curled into a tiny smile, and he handed me another set of latex gloves from his bag. “Rule number one; never touch the bodies without gloves. They can smell it on you, and you might as well wear a dinner bell after that. Rule number two; don’t leave anything with your scent on it behind. Crawlers are blind, and rely mostly on hearing and smell, so once they get your scent, they’ll track you to the ends of the earth.”
I helped him lift the bedstead and watched with a roiling stomach as Chris reached under it to pull the first dead child free.
Pausing with the mangled pile of bones and flesh at his feet, Chris picked up a blood-smeared hairband, and pressed it into one little lifeless hand. “And rule number three; never assume they can’t be beaten. Every new creature out here is learning about this world just like we are, and they make mistakes. All you have to do to survive is trick them into making more than you.”
We gathered the remains of the man from the hall and laid him beside his wife and daughters. Chris piled the wood from the broken furniture on the bodies and emptied a small bottle of lighter fluid from his pack onto a spare sock from one of the dresser drawers. This he tossed onto the pile, along with another dowsing of butane. We both shed our gloves, which Chris bagged in a plastic Ziploc baggie to take with us, and stepped back.
I stood silent alongside him, the two of us staring down at the forlorn remains.
“For the record,” Chris let out a muffled cough, and I turned to see him blinking hard, his strong veneer beginning to crack. “It does bother me. I just . . . I try not to—”
“It’s okay.” My chest swarmed with nervous butterflies, and I dared to shift a little closer to him. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I get it.”
He met my gaze, and Chris’s stoic expression softened into a grateful smile, momentary emotion glistening in his eyes. “Thanks, Hannah.”
My heart did somersaults in my chest as I drank that sight in, a pleasant tingle in my guts. Good God, he was handsome, the moonlight from the window behind him highlighting Chris’s rugged jawline, his muscled shoulders, his pearly white teeth. Despite the awful smell of death in the room and the horrible circumstances which had brought us there, in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to stand there and exist in his orbit for just a little while longer.
I wonder what it would be like to . . .
A flicker of movement in the window chased the fledgling thought from my mind and replaced the warmth in my chest with creeping dread.
Just beyond the yard outside the house, the tall grass parted in several places, like dark moving slashes on the swaying ocean of green. Even in the dim light of the moon, I could see the high angles of forelegs as they stalked through the vegetation, the serpentine heads hung low, their back legs buried in the concealment of the field. Half a dozen . . . no . . . a dozen figures slunk toward the house, and something in the back of my mind already seemed to know what they were.
Crawlers always come back to the site of a good kill.
I tried to scream, to stutter a warning, but before I could, a long, clawed limb reached through the window and hoisted a huge gray shadow into the room.