Dead Things (16 page)

Chapter Fourteen: Run for Your Life

Ian is first up the steps to the door. It’s cracked open, and pops wide as Ian strikes it with his shoulder. He goes down, sliding across the floor, into the staircase opposite the entrance. He’s up quickly, calling to others to move fast. “Don’t look back!”

Last is Wright. She has to make up distance fast. She’s in, and she shouts at Ian to shut the door. He slams it hard, lopping off the fingers of a trailing monster. They fly in all directions, and Anne cries out again.

Ian leans against the door, low and panting hard. Burt straddles him, his weight distributed high. A fingerless fist demands entry, pounding against the rotting wood.

“Where the hell did it come from?” Ian demands of a frozen Van, his eyes daggers.

Anne whimpers uncontrollably into Jessica’s bosom.

Wright steps forward, allowing a slinking Van to find cover behind her. “Ian, we’ll get to that later.” What matters now is that he holds the door. She orders Van to assist.

Van hesitates. She grabs him by the shoulder and pushes him to Burt’s side.

Wright mutters something about securing the place, then dashes deeper into the home.

The hammering continues, Van wincing with each thud against his shoulder. Ian leers at him, his eyes barely slits. Van sees the anger and responds, “I just…just didn’t see them.”

That’s no excuse, Ian retorts. “Save it for the Hestons. They should be along shortly.”

“My Lord,” Burt exclaims, considering that the remains of the Hestons could already be slithering their way to the doorstep. The door bucks, and he leans harder into it. “Hold tight!”

“Man, fuck this!” Van exclaims. He starts to sob.

“Fuck you!” Ian lashes out. “Here’s a suggestion—” Sometimes the difference between a suggestion and criticism is subtle. Sometimes it is not. “—Next time you’re on point, try not to let any of us get eaten.”

Van responds in kind to the criticism. “Fuck you, Ian.”

Fuck me? Ian’s engulfed in rage. He turns to Anne, back still pressed against the door. “You know,” he says to the terrified girl, “I used to think Van could only muster ‘fuck this’ or ‘fuck that’ because he had too many thoughts to manage in his head. ‘Fuck it’ was just easier. But I was wrong, because the truth is that Van doesn’t care about anything. He doesn’t care about you, Anne. He doesn’t care about you, me...” Ian laughs shrilly, a man losing control, “…God, he doesn’t even care about himself.”

Ian strikes a nerve. Van twitches, almost imperceptibly, but enough for Ian to take satisfaction.

Wright’s return interrupts the bickering. Her return surprises the girls, and they squeal. “It’s all right, girls,” Wright soothes, petting their heads. “It’s going to be fine.” “That’s how they initially got in,” she says, pointing to the door. She eyes the men. The rest of this floor looks secure. She’s going to look around for something to use to seal the door.

“Why don’t you just shoot them!” Van cries, plaintively.

“Because she can’t,” Ian answers. “The gunshots will attract more of those things.”

True
, Wright thinks. Plus, she needs to conserve the ammunition.

“Girls, would you mind checking the drawers in the kitchen for knives, weapons…anything you think is valuable?” Jessica starts to protest, but Wright explains the kitchen is safe. “And, it is quieter.” That convinces them. They move down the dark hallway before Wright mounts the staircase.

The thing punches the door almost rhythmically, the metronome beats counting the seconds until Wright will return. It’s just inches away, Ian thinks, just a rotten piece of wood between us. It is so close he almost confuses the beast’s battering for the thumping of his own heart.

Minutes pass, each one moving with the speed of an epoch. Although Anne and Jessica have quieted, the monster persists, unabated. The door, fortunately, holds firm, but Ian cannot say the same for his resolve. He finds his courage quaking, the initial adrenaline rush receding.

He turns his thoughts to something else. His family. Song lyrics. Sex, or what he thinks sex might entail. But the noise outside forces such thoughts aside. It will be worse soon, worse when the Hestons join the visitor demanding entry. There will be more of them to come.

Only then does he realize the folly of Kari’s search of the home. She should not be alone. His blood goes cold. More of them to come? What if they were already upstairs?

With that, Ian bounds up the stairs, three at a time. Toward the top, he stops. He lived most of his life in an old house, and he knows how to walk to minimize the creaking. Still, as he steps heel to toe, the last few steps groan under his weight.

He takes note of the blistering wallpaper. Sun-bleached, he can barely perceive the detail of birds flitting to and from bouquets of bluebonnets. “Kari,” he squawks meekly, still hidden in the shadows of the staircase.

He peers left. A brightly lit room bathed in hues of baby blue greets him from the hallway’s end. He opts, though, for the right, toward a darker burgundy room five paces past a full bathroom. A carpeted runner silences his tentative steps.

From the left, behind him now, something lurches forward from the blue room, a child’s bedroom. It shuffles silently, shoulder to the wall. Its dead hands slide eagerly over the aging paper, convulsing like ancient spiders about to pounce.

Ian moves more quickly, unaware of the danger at his back. Once he passes the bathroom, he takes longer strides towards the end of the corridor. He whispers Kari’s name again, hoping his appeal for an answer will elicit a response, before taking the final plunge through the dark threshold.

Hand to the frame, he swallows and steps through the entry.

The room is dark, save for two thin shafts of light cutting through the dust from a pair of southern windows. The beams barely escape the darkness of heavy drapes that imprison the room in blackness.

Ian’s eyes slowly adjust to the gloom. He detects a great four-post bed standing solemnly before him. It anchors the far wall, dividing the room into two, presumably “his” and “hers,” sides. Ian is stricken by the fastidiousness of the room, the made bed. Even in this family’s final days, they bucked against the chaos, seeking refuge in order, things as simple as tucking in sheets and arranging pillows. For Ian, making the bed was always a chore. To these people, though, it must have brought them solace as their world caved in around them.

Wright steps away from a chest of drawers, into the struggling sunbeams. Dust dances about her illuminated face, glowing.
Like fairy dust
, he considers. Ian spies the hint of another smile.

It doesn’t happen in slow motion like in the pictures.

The gun is up and out in the beat of Ian’s heart. The hammer connects with the percussion charge instantaneously. The muzzle flashes, and the bullet’s away, long before the thundering report ever reaches Ian’s ears.

Wright moves with surprising purpose and efficiency, a trained assassin unleashed. Before the body can even complete its descent to the floor, she’s there. As the lifeless remains hit the carpet, she delivers the coup de gras: two additional bullets to the head.

Ian, eyes wide in disbelief, is balled up next to the shriveled corpse of a boy, perhaps his brother’s age. The last of the residents of this old plantation-style house, the adolescent waited eighteen years in his bedroom, biding his time pacing from one blue wall to the other. His bedroom, a place of refuge for most teens, was an eternal cage. Or, it would have been if Wright had not mercifully released him.

“I’m sorry for that,” Wrights says to Ian. She didn’t have time to warn him. She extends a hand. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Ian replies. “Thank you.”

She is happy to see him, making her next statement all the more confusing. “You disobeyed instructions. You shouldn’t be up here.”

“I just—” Ian stops, aware that he, like Van mere minutes before, has made a mistake, one that could have been as fatal if he had made the decision to move left instead of right. He quickly apologizes and departs the room, Burt’s demands for an explanation echoing up the stairway.

Burt’s calls drown out Wright’s barely audible whisper: Ian stay. It is okay.

No one, at least in Wright’s recollection, ever had her back before. Every acquaintance-turned-friend-turned-lover-turned-distant memory had passed through her life with little more impact than a slight breeze. These men, mostly nameless and faceless apparitions, usually appeared to her in the dark hours of night. If she was lucky, one might leave an impression, even make his presence felt. Inexorably, they would retreat with the coming of the morning sun, their ghostly influence exorcised.

But Ian is different.

Her parents, too, are a distant memory. They are still alive, in fact, and eventually returned to her childhood home where they dwell. “Home”—that’s what she calls it, because “house that I used to eat and sleep in” is too cumbersome, albeit more accurate. She has neither seen her mom and dad nor the house in seven years, and they live just twenty minutes away.

Home is a foreign concept to her. She packs and moves lightly, always a jacket and a scarf from her next stay.

It started when she was little. She ran away from home often. When she was eleven, she moved in with her fifth-grade teacher for a month. She was his big secret, and he promised that he would marry her and present her with a great gaudy bauble, a tag for her ring finger one day should she keep their relationship private. After a few weeks, she got sick of the abuse and moved out.

The pervert was hurt. He said she was afraid, calling her a “timid little girl scared of commitment, of being alone, of everything.”

“You’re right about one thing,” she said, “I am a little girl. And you should be ashamed. But afraid?” She laughed. “Well, at least not of you!” She extended a finger—not her ring finger—and flew from his study like a caged bird released.

She never said anything to her parents or the principal. She continued to take his class, even participated in his Thursday study groups. During that school year, she never hinted at weakness. He would go on to give her straight As.

But in sixth grade, the world changed. And nothing really mattered after that. She volunteered for the military at thirteen, a mere child soldier.

Wright’s move proved prescient, for a year later the military reinstituted the draft. Tours of duty were required of every man and woman. There, in the greater service of God and man, Wright came to recognize her aptitude: Survival.

“Survival Specialist?” her brother teased at their grandmother’s wake a few years before.

They stood within feet of each other, but they couldn’t have been more distant. They cautiously eyed each other over the tops of their coffee mugs, part of a collection aggressively pursued by their Nana. She had nearly a thousand mugs, purchased at garage sales and flea markets over fifty years.

“‘Survival’ hardly qualifies as skill set,” he continued. “Aren’t you really just a ‘Living Specialist’? And, if so, maybe I should have a military career. After all, we’re all just living.”

“Really, Jim? All of us?” Wright motioned toward the casket in the next room.

“Shit,” Jim sighed, eyeing the black lacquered box containing their grandmother’s body and severed head. “You know what I mean.”