I woke up sometime later. I sat up and looked around, confused.
I was alone in the Police Chief's office. All the other cots were empty.
And the light was too dim.
I looked over and saw a single candle flickering on the desk -- the only one still burning. The rest had gone out while I had been dozing. The candle was burned down all the way to the bottom, producing only a feeble glow of illumination, its flame sputtering weakly.
As I watched, my heart racing, it went out with a hiss, casting the room into darkness.
I heard an ungodly roar that seemed to come from all around me, from above and below.
I jerked my head up and saw dozens -- no, hundreds -- of glowing, malevolent red eyes glaring at me from the blackness of the ceiling.
I opened my mouth to scream, but the blackness fell upon me like a sheet before I could utter a sound.
I opened my eyes and screamed. I looked around, my heart thudding in my chest. I was surprised to see I was back in my own bedroom at home.
I tried to get my wildly beating heart under control and catch my breath. An enormous wave of relief overwhelmed me. It had all just been a nightmare; the worst fucking nightmare I had had in my life. I thought I might actually break down in tears for a second.
A familiar voice spoke from outside my door: "Honey, are you alright?"
Before I could answer, my door opened, and my mother, wearing her robe, stepped in and turned on my light. She looked at me with an expression of concern. "I heard you scream."
I had never been so glad to see her. I found my voice. "I'm okay, Mom, just a bad dream, that's all."
She came over and placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder. "You feel better now?"
"Yeah. A lot better."
"I'm afraid I have some bad news for you," she told me with a voice of sad regret.
I looked at her, puzzled. "What, Mom?"
She looked at me. As I watched, her skin shriveled, pulling tightly to her skull, her lips drawing back from her teeth, transforming her mouth into a hideous rictus grin. Her nose rotted away before my eyes, leaving only a gaping nasal cavity. Her eyes sank into her skull, leaving only hollow black sockets. This all happened in less than two seconds.
The desiccated, decayed cadaver that had been my mother loomed above me. It spoke, its voice a horrible guttural rasp: "You're still dreaming."
It leaped on top of me, and
I sat up with a gasp, my eyes darting around frantically. I was on my cot in the Police Chief's office, the others curled up on their cots around me. The candles were all still burning.
I sat there, feeling paranoid, wondering if I was really awake this time.
"Bad dream?" a voice asked, startling me. I looked over and saw Dante leaning against the far wall, the shotgun standing beside his leg.
"Yeah. The worst." I told him, brushing my hair back with a trembling hand.
"Yeah. We all have them once in a while. Weird, ain't it? If you think about it, we're already asleep in the real world. It's like we're dreaming inside a dream. That make sense?"
"Yeah, I guess so," I replied, then shrugged. "Or not. I don't know anymore."
Dante looked away from me, seeming to stare off into space. "Nothing makes much sense around here. I keep trying to tell myself this whole fucking thing is just some long-ass nightmare and sooner or later I'm gonna wake up...but it never happens."
"Well, if it makes you feel better, you're not alone," I told him. I took out my phone to check the time...but the battery had died while I had been dozing. "Hey, Dante, what time is it?"
He shrugged. "Who the fuck knows? Like Aaron said, time's fucked up here. I only feel like I've been standing here for like five minutes, but look..." he gestured toward the window. I looked and saw murky gray light outside. Daylight.
"Well, at least the sun's up," I said, then added: "well, sort of."
"I can't even remember the last time I saw actual sunlight," Dante told me with a look of sad longing. "Every day here is the same. Gray, dull, dead."
The others began to stir. One by one they began to awaken. They came fully awake the moment their eyes opened, like a switch had been flipped. None of them yawned or seemed groggy.
Aaron saw the daylight outside. "Well, we got through another night, anyway," he offered as if it was some consolation.
Nadine immediately got up to check on Lauren. She looked worse than she had the night before. Her skin was whitish-gray and her breathing was very weak.
"I don't think she's going to last..." Nadine began.
Lauren suddenly gasped and jerked violently. She jerked again, then went still. She stopped breathing.
"Oh, God," Clark said softly. "She's gone, isn't she?"
Click-clack. The sound of Aaron racking the slide on his shotgun. I spun around to him. He raised the shotgun in Lauren's direction, his face grave, but determined. "Nadine, get away from her. You know what has to be done."
Nadine stepped protectively in front of the dead girl's body, between her and Aaron's shotgun, shielding her. "NO! Stay away from her!"
"You knew this was coming, Nadine. She's going to turn."
"You're not touching her, Aaron, no one is!" Nadine pulled her handgun from the back of her jeans and aimed it at Aaron. "I'll kill anyone who does!"
In response to Nadine pulling her gun on Aaron, Clark aimed his own shotgun at her. "Put the gun down, Nadine! Don't make this any worse than it already is!"
"Shut up, Clark!" Nadine yelled at him without taking her eyes off Aaron. "Aaron, if you shoot her, so help me, I'll fucking..."
"She's turning!" Jeff screamed in a panicky voice and pointed to Lauren's cot. I had been distracted by the ongoing standoff, but now I turned my eyes to Lauren's body and saw it was beginning to twitch. Her fingers were starting to move. Her eyelids began to flutter.
"Oh, shit," Dante said in a voice barely above a whisper.
"Everybody get back!" Aaron yelled, "don't get too close to her!"
I recoiled several feet, my mind feeling dazed, reality seeming to float away from me. I felt like I was witnessing a scene from a horror movie, from the perspective of one of the characters.
Lauren sat up violently on the cot, emitting a hideous howl of inhuman rage. Her eyes opened...they were dead white.
We looked at her, our eyes wide in shock.
"Jesus Christ," Clark moaned.
"HATE LIFE! HATE LIVING!" the thing that had been Lauren shrieked. "HATE LIFE! HATE LIVING!" She lunged in the direction of the person closest to her -- Nadine.
Nadine spun towards her, aiming her handgun away from Aaron and pointing it in Lauren's face as she pounced on her. She shot her point-black in the forehead. Blood and brain matter exploded from the back of Lauren's head and she tumbled to the floor, lying there motionless for a few seconds...before her body dissolved into black slime which immediately evaporated. All that remained were her clothes.
The gun fell from Nadine's hand, falling to the floor with a clunk. She stood there, motionless, like a statue, her face blank. Then, very softly, she began to weep. She lowered her head, her shoulders shuddering.
Aaron started to step towards her as if to comfort her, but she pointed her finger at him and said sharply: "NO!" she looked around the room at the rest of us, her eyes still wet with tears but cold and steely. "Stay away from me, all of you! Just leave me alone!"
She marched out of the office, slamming the door behind her. I could still hear her sobbing in the corridor.
We stood there, looking around at each other. Me...Clark...Dante...Jeff...Aaron. Then we lowered our heads and looked at Lauren's empty clothes on the floor, standing like mourners gathered around a grave.
*****
Nadine came back in about twenty minutes later. She had stopped crying and was composed, her icy, standoffish façade back in place. Her eyes were still red but her voice was even and she spoke with hard resolve.
"All right," she said, sitting down on her cot angrily, "she's dead and it's over with." She flashed us a glare and her voice turned hostile. "Don't any of you fucking tell me you're sorry. It won't change a goddamn thing." She looked down, glowering at the floor.
A moment of silence passed. I broke it, turning to Aaron. "So when do we head out?"
"The sooner the better," he told me. "We don't know how much daylight we have to work with. Sometimes it goes fast and sometimes it seems to stretch out for days. We've got to keep an eye on the sky."
"Let's take inventory first," Clark said, "see how well we're stocked right now."
It only took a few minutes. We were down to two and a half candles and one half-full kerosene lantern.
"Now let's check our ammo situation," Aaron said.
Everyone unloaded their guns and we tallied up the ammunition on the Police Chief's desk. There were eighteen shotgun shells, twenty-nine .45 ACP's and thirty-six nine-millimeters.
"Not much, but it's gonna have to do," Aaron said as they reloaded their weapons. He surprised me by handing me a 9mm Beretta. "You think you can handle that?"
"I think so," I replied, turning the pistol over in my hands.
"Ever fire a gun before?" Dante asked me.
"No, but I've played a lot of video games."
"The safety's on the side," Aaron pointed. "When you see that red dot that means you're good to go. It'll kick like crazy when you pull the trigger, make sure you've got a good grip on it or it'll fly out of your hand. It'll make a fuck of a loud noise, too. Be warned."
"Let's get going," Dante said.
Aaron turned to Nadine. "Keep on eye on things while we're gone."
She nodded. "Watch your asses out there."
Clark lit the lantern with a match and picked it up. We followed him out of the office and took the stairs back down to the underground garage. Clark pushed the wheelbarrow full of cinderblocks off the manhole cover then used a crowbar to pull it up. Aaron shined his flashlight down into the sewer tunnel. He motioned for us to be quiet, and listened intently. I heard nothing but silence.
"Wait up here for a minute," he whispered to the rest of us, and descended the ladder. He unslung his shotgun and aimed it around, holding his flashlight beneath it police-style. A minute passed, then he motioned up at us to follow him.
One by one we climbed down into the sewer tunnel -- me, Jeff, Dante. We joined Aaron at the bottom. "It looks clear," he told us. "I was afraid some of them might have followed us down here after yesterday." He looked up at Clark and nodded at him.
Clark looked down the manhole at us. "Good luck, guys," he said, then slide the manhole cover back in place.
"Here, hold this for a minute," Aaron told me, handing me his flashlight. He took out an old, frayed and creased sheet of paper, unfolding it and holding it against the sewer wall. It was a schematic of the sewer system that ran beneath the town. A red X he had drawn marked the location of the entrance beneath the police station. He studied the map carefully, tracing his finger along it.
"The sewers run all the way to the edge of town," he said. "That's only a couple miles away. From there we can take the highway on foot to the next town. Ten miles."
"Why not just go into the city?" I asked. "That's a fuck of a lot closer." The nearest city was only five miles out of town in the opposite direction.
He shook his head. "Way too dangerous. A lot of dead folks. More than we can handle. Safer to avoid heavily populated areas and stick to smaller towns." He put away the map. "Let's get moving."
We followed him down the sewer. He seemed to know the layout pretty well. We made several turns. Some of the tunnels seemed to be as wide as an airplane hanger, others were so narrow we had to go through them single file. I don't know how much time passed, half an hour maybe, but eventually we came to a dead-end. There was a ladder leading up. Aaron took out the map and looked at it again. "This should be it," he said.
He climbed the rungs to the top and forced the heavy iron manhole cover up with his shoulders. He scooted it aside.
I could see a disc of dismal gray daylight above. He climbed out and looked around. He looked down at us. "Looks good. Come up."
I climbed up to the top and Aaron took my hand, helping me out. I looked around as Dante and Jeff climbed up after me. We were in the middle of the highway on the outskirts of town. Open farmland surrounded us. In the normal world it was late summer and the crops had already been coming in pretty good. Here, like everything else, they were long dead and rotted. I looked again, creeped out once more by the barren, desolate, lifeless world around me. Even the trees were dead, their branches bare, as if it were late fall instead of July. There were none of those living corpses in sight.
Dante and Jeff climbed out onto the highway, then Aaron slid the manhole cover back in place. He took a can of orange spray paint out of his jacket and painted a large X on the road beside it, presumably so we could find it on the way back.
"Let's get moving," he told us. "Keep your eyes open and watch your backs."
We started walking in the direction of the next town. Aaron was in the lead, shotgun in hand, constantly stopping to scan our surroundings for any sign of trouble, using a pair of binoculars he had brought along. I was walking behind him with Dante and Jeff was behind us.
None of us spoke as we walked. An hour (maybe) passed. I had walked several miles by then, but I realized I didn't feel dehydrated or thirsty. And I wasn't sweating. To break the silence, I decided to make small talk with Dante beside me. I turned to him. "Nadine was pretty protective of Lauren, wasn't she?" I said in a low voice.
"Yeah, she liked the kid, even though she wasn't with us for very long. They were close." He paused, then looked at me. "Don't tell Nadine I told you this or she'll fucking murder me. This is just between us, deal?"
"Deal."
"Lauren reminded Nadine of her little sister. They had a pretty rough life, I guess. Their dad was a real shitbag. He used to...well, 'loan' them out, I guess you can say. To pay the rent money."
"Fuck," I whispered.
"Yeah. Nadine's sister killed herself when she was thirteen and Nadine was seventeen. That's why she's so messed up. Why she took Lauren's death so hard."
I didn't know what to say. The silence resumed. We walked on. We were coming up on a farmhouse beside the road. It looked long deserted, but Aaron motioned for us to stop. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and studied the farmhouse for a couple minutes.
"I think I saw something moving around in there."
"Residents?" Jeff asked.
"What else?" Aaron lowered his binoculars. "We'll have to get off the road. It's too dangerous to pass that house. It's too close."
"Fuck," Dante muttered.
"What are we going to do?" I asked.
"We'll duck into the field," Aaron said, pointing to our left, "circumvent the house, come back on the road after we clear it."
"We have guns," I pointed out. "Why not just shoot them?"
"We don't know how many could be in there," he said. "And our ammo is limited. If they see us they'll follow us into town."
We stepped off the road, crouching low and slipping into the field, moving low through the rotted corn stalks. We hadn't gone more than a few feet before Aaron halted, motioning for silence. We stopped. Listened.
"You hear that?" Aaron whispered to us.
I listened...and heard something. I couldn't believe it. It was a human voice. Calling from off in the distance. I couldn't make out what it was saying at first, but it gradually got louder as whoever it was got closer. A man's voice, calling out repeatedly.
"Hello! Is there anyone there? Hello!"
"Jesus," Jeff whispered. "Someone else is out here."
Aaron peered through the stalks and raised his binoculars. "Someone's coming down the road," he told us.
"Who?" I asked.
"Some guy. Looks like he hasn't been here for long. Fresh meat."
"Lemme see," I said. He handed over his binoculars and I looked through them. Through the magnified lenses I could see the figure of a man walking down the highway, coming from the direction we were heading in. He looked middle-aged and was wearing a suit and tie. His clothes, while somewhat rumpled, still looked relatively clean He was looking around wildly, disoriented and alarmed, calling out over and over, with desperation.
"Hello! Please, is anyone around? I need help! I've been in a car accident! I can't find my wife!"
"What are we going to do?" I whispered to Aaron.
Aaron shrugged, his face grim. "Nothing we can do."
"We have to help him! We can't leave him out there! He doesn't know what's going on!"
"We can't help him," he told me shortly. "It's too risky. If we break our cover we risk being spotted."
I started to protest, but Dante cut me off. "He's right, kid. Even if we tried to warn him, he wouldn't understand what was going on. And if we tried to explain, he'd think we were crazy. Dude's a goner."
I turned back to the road, watching helplessly, feeling sick. The man was approaching the farmhouse. A figure appeared in the doorway, drawn by his voice. I couldn't distinguish any of its features at this distance...until I raised the binoculars and saw its empty black eye sockets and decaying face.
The man spotted the figure in the doorway. He began running towards it, a note of relief in his voice. "Oh thank God! Hey, please, I need help! I've been in an accident! Do you think you can--"
It wasn't until he was almost upon the figure that he saw it for the horrible, decomposed mockery of a human being it was. He froze in his tracks, quivering with shock and horror. He began to back away, but it was already too late. The corpse pounced upon him, pulling him to the ground. Other corpses began to emerge from the farmhouse behind it, at least a half dozen. All of them shouting that familiar mantra: "HATE LIFE, HATE LIVING! HATE LIFE, HATE LIVING!"
The others looked away, Aaron staring down at the ground, but I watched.
The man screamed wildly and struggled as they grabbed ahold of him and began to tear him apart, limb from limb. He screamed right up till they twisted his head off his shoulders. They hoisted his body parts up to the sky victoriously, like gruesome trophies.
I turned away, feeling nauseous.
"Let's keep going," Aaron said.
We moved on.
TO BE CONTINUED