Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (72 page)

Katie continued to run. The hallway behind her clogged, and she turned to see several men falling to the ground, dark-walkers upon them. She stopped in her tracks, forced to watch, struck by morbid curiosity: she saw a dark-walker grab a man’s arm and rip it right out of the socket, a torrential spray of blood plastering the wall. The man’s mouth was opened in a scream that spread down the corridor; Mark grabbed at her arm and tugged her along. She retreated from her daze and continued to run. She ducked into a side room and slammed the door, locking it tightly. She heard the darkwalkers run past, and when the sound of their footsteps diminished, she quietly unlocked the door and pushed it open. She headed back the way she had come, stepping over strewn body parts, her bare feet splashing in the steaming blood. Something soft and round squeezed between the cracks of her toes; she glanced down saw an eyeball staring up at her. A silent scream erupted in her lungs, and she kicked it away. She stumbled down the corridor, her world spinning. A body lay against the wall, the torso removed, blood continuing to spread into a pool on the floor, intestines scattered over the stone floor like the entrails of a nautical squid. The corpse’s stared open at her, and the mouth was held in a permanent scream despite the absence of life.

Mark realized Katie wasn’t with him.
It’s not your problem
. He didn’t turn back for her: the darkwalkers were still right behind him, and he figured they had gotten her. He fired his M16 several times, and many dark-walkers fell to the ground, bullet-holes drilled through their skulls. Their comrades clambered over their bodies and continued the pursuit. All the men with him decided to make a stand, but Mark knew such a notion was ill-derived.

Their screams didn’t last too long.

Mark ran into one of the bedrooms and slammed the door shut, threw the bolt. He grabbed one of the cots and pushed it against the door. He sat down on another cot, loaded a new magazine into the rifle. He leaned the rifle against the cot and found the pack of cigarettes in his jeans. He lit one, took a delicious drag, felt the smoke crawling through his lungs, breathlessly sweet.
You don’t have
time to smoke.
He didn’t listen to reason. It helped calm his nerves. Helped him think…

Helped him to ultimately realize that he had nowhere to go.

The hallway forked: one direction led to the roof, the other to the friar’s office. The man rushed up the stairs leading to the roof, Sarah quick on his heels. Harker and the others separated, heading towards the friar’s office, knowing it was a heavy door with an iron lock. Most of the dark-walkers turned towards Harker and the others.

Harker led the way, and the stairs were steep: the dark-walkers worked together, like a pack of ravenous wolves bent on satisfying their hunger, and they reached out at the legs of their prey, swiping several men down. Harker didn’t look back as their screams filled his ears. He reached the door to the friar’s office and flung it open; he turned to let in the men behind him, but he was alone. He slowly moved back to the stairs and glanced down, could hear more gunfire and screams; the Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

333

bursts of light from the gunfire cast extended and transcendent silhouettes against the walls: darkwalkers atop of the men, tearing them to pieces, their blood running among their mutilated bodies, weaving its way down the spiral staircase like multiple waterfalls. Harker turned away and ran into the friar’s office, slamming the door and throwing the lock. He stepped back, bumping into the desk. He drew a deep breath, but any sense of tranquility was shattered as a dark-walker lunged at him from the shadows of the room, knocking him onto the desk. The dark-walker was atop of him, holding him down with its hands, its fetid breath washing over him, the stench nauseating. Harker let out a scream and kicked the creature in the groin, causing the dark-walker to howl and stumble away. Harker rolled himself off of the desk, landing atop of the friar’s skeleton. He grabbed the friar’s skull and leapt to his feet; the dark-walker came at him, swiping its arms through the air as if they were scythe blades. Harker dodged the assailant and swung the skull into the creature’s face. The dark-walker tumbled into the bookcase; Harker fell upon the monster, gripping the skull tightly, smashing it into its face again and again. Blood painted the skull, and several droplets sprayed against Harker’s neck and chin. The monster went still, and Harker dropped the skull; it rolled into the foot of the bookcase. His eyes absorbed the impaled face, the mesh of bone and blood and muscle and brain, and he wrenched his face to the side and vomited all over the floor. He hung over on his hands and knees, bile crawling along the corners of his mouth, chest dry-heaving.

The growls and snarls of the dark-walkers greeted him, sweeping underneath the door, and he managed to get to his feet. He pushed the desk against the large wooden door and stepped back, heart pounding weakly in his chest. The creatures hurled themselves against the door, and he began to weep as the door splintered, their hands reaching through, fingers grasping mindlessly at the air. Their hands were covered in blood, and bits of human flesh nestled behind their elongated fingernails.

Sarah and the man reached the rooftop. Kyle shouted that he had emptied his last magazine. Several sick-and-infected appeared behind them, down the stairwell; Kyle shoved the newcomers out of the way and tried to shut the door; a dark-walker managed to pull itself through the crack in the door. It snapped its venomous teeth at Kyle, and he butted it in the face with his rifle; the zombie fell back into the man, and the man gripped its arms and hurled it to the ground. It rolled along the rooftop, snarling and snapping, and reached the edge; Sarah kicked it in the stomach, and it fell, falling twenty feet to the ground, where it landed with the sound of splintering bones and rupturing organs; several dark-walkers changed their course and descended upon it, fighting in a mad frenzy for the remains. Kyle shoved the door shut, and the man pressed his weight against it as more dark-walkers tried to push their way through. Sarah paced back and forth. She looked down at the lawn, could see hundreds of dark-walkers surrounding the fence, dozens more moving into the church through the shattered windows.
It’s going to end. It’s going to end like this
. Kyle and the man were shouting to one another, but she didn’t hear any of it: she could only see the dark figures moving down below, swaying in a rhythmic motion in their march towards the Holy Immaculata.

Katie made her way into the sanctuary. She was quiet, hardly breathing, and the dark-walkers didn’t notice. They were huddled in groups about the room, hunched over corpses, feasting and fighting over the remains like rabid animals. She saw one grab a leg and scurry away; two others intercepted and fought for the meat. They snarled and snapped at one another.
Like sharks in a feeding frenzy
. She felt her way along the wall, moving quietly. She tripped over a strewn ankle-bone, still wrapped in a cocoon of flesh, and she slashed a hand across her mouth to keep quiet. She bit her lip and continued Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

334

along the wall. She reached the stairwell leading towards the roof and began to climb, hearing the slurping and munching of the creatures in the Holy of Holies.

∑Ω∑

Mark enters the house. Katie is still sitting on the couch, staring numbly at the wall. He doesn’t acknowledge her presence as he makes his way into the kitchen. Sarah is holding several bed-sheets taken from one of the bedrooms.

“Can you help me?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Mark says.

They work together, unfolding the bed-sheet and maneuvering it underneath Cameron’s body by lifting her legs, abdomen, chest, arms, and head at different times. They wrap the bed-sheet tight around her, and Sarah finds a stapler and begins stapling the edges of the sheet together. Blood is already staining the light cloth where Cameron’s head lies. After a moment they step back.

“Now what?” Sarah asks.

“We should bury her.”

“Do we have time?”

“It’s only nine in the morning.”

“Okay.”

Mark and Sarah have carried the body out to the backyard. Katie steps into the kitchen, and her eyes are drawn to the floor: the blood has not been cleaned, and it resides in the cross-stitched corners of the linoleum tile. She draws a deep breath, grabs several towels sitting upon a chair beside the table, kneels down, begins to scrub. A moment later Anthony comes in behind her. He kneels beside her.

“Let me help,” he says.

She hands him a towel.

As he scrubs, he asks, “How are you doing?”

“I’m okay,” she says.

“Okay.”

After a moment she drops the towel and stares at the smeared blood.

“It wasn’t supposed to end up like this,” she says.

“I know,” Anthony replies.

“They were all good people. Really good people.”

“I know.”

“They didn’t deserve that. None of them deserved it.”

“I know.”

“Except for Carla. She deserved it.”

Anthony doesn’t say anything.

“You know what?” Katie asks.

“What’s that?”

“I hope Carla is burning in Hell right now. I really do.”

Anthony just keeps scrubbing.

∑Ω∑

Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

335

The women huddled together in the back of the room, holding one another tightly, knowing the future but unwilling to speak it. The door shook with each impact, the creatures howling in hungerstricken desperation; with each impact, dust fell from the ceiling, and the women’s hearts leapt into their throats and choked their lungs. Nancy moved with a cold detachment. One of the cabinets hung open, and she filled several syringes with a murky liquid.
Allopumiliotoxin 267A
, a poison derived from the jungle’s poison dart frogs; Harker had acquired it just in case such an incident as the current would take place. She placed the syringes on an aluminum tray, and betraying the own fear filling her darkening soul, she moved person-to-person, quieting them as she inserted the needle into their skin and depressed the syringe’s plunger. The dark-walkers thrashed against the door, and the bolts began to quake and rattle. She injected everyone, and she stepped back to see that their tears had stopped, their eyes were open in quiet wonder, their hearts having stopped beating and lungs having ceased to breathe. She had no syringe left for herself. She turned and faced the door. It burst open, splinters spraying through the air. The creatures lunged inside, and Nancy closed her eyes in a strange serenity as they grabbed her by the arm and flung her to the ground. Her cheek pressed into the cold floor, and she felt warm breath on her neck, teeth along her upper spine, a brief burst of pain… And then nothing.

Anthony refused to climb the steps leading to the sanctuary, though he was thankful that no creatures had descended into the church’s bowels. He had ceased to hear gunfire, heard only brief screams, the constant sound of scurrying coming from the upper levels. He knew it was only a matter of time before the zombies decided to explore the basement. He made his way into the church kitchen, eyeing the window over the charcoal stove. He climbed atop the oven, wincing at the loud sounds that echoed throughout the room. He grabbed a frying pan lying on the counter and smashed it through the window, glass scattering outside;
There’s no way they didn’t hear that one
. He poked his head through the window, saw nothing but grass and a tree, the moon’s light scattered by the freshly-budding flowers sprawled across the limbs. He bit his lip and scurried through the broken window, pulling himself forward, hands pressed down in the mud. He crawled through the moist grass towards the tree, and using the tree’s trunk as a mask, pulled himself up and looked down towards the fence.

It was totally abandoned.

He could hear sounds coming from the other side of the church. He dropped down to all fours once more and began crawling amidst the overgrown grass, feeling only half-sheltered, fully aware that no longer did he have walls to mask his movements. If he were to be seen, the fence that had sheltered them for so long would become the only barrier to his escape, and he would suffer an agonizing death.

Carla remained fastened to the pipes. She had heard the sound of shattering glass, but she didn’t dare make a sound. Moments passed, and she could hear movement outside the wide-open door. Her mouth moved, totally dry: “Hello?” she croaked, hoping it was one of the others. A figure entered the room. Long blonde hair. A freckled face. A sigh of relief flooded through Carla. The figure, a teenage girl dressed in footy pajamas, stood watching her. Carla begged for help, to be unleashed. The girl knelt down beside Adrian’s body. Carla promised she didn’t do it, but then she went quiet.

The girl lifted Adrian’s shirt, revealing the lethal knife-wound in his side. Her hand darted inside the slash, and her fingers explored the forbidden warmth; she removed her hand, holding a Anthony Barnhart

Dwellers of the Night

336

clump of his intestines. Carla’s eyes watered, nausea rippling through her system. The girl lifted the intestines to her nose, sniffed. A faint smile crossed over her lips, and she opened her mouth.

“No…” Carla moaned, and she could only close her eyes, refusing to watch. The girl sank her teeth into the warm organ. Carla opened her eyes after a moment, saw the girl stuffing her mouth full of the boy’s intestines, moaning in pleasure. She tugged the intestines from his side, her movements causing Adrian’s body to rock back and forth, his lifeless eyes showing no emotion. Carla could only watch, hoping the girl would simply ignore her.

Katie climbed the stairwell. Bodies littered the steps, dismembered and decapitated, body parts strewn about like LEGOS in a child’s playroom. She had to press her hand against the stone wall for balance, the blood from the corpses coating the steps in a slick paste. She recognized some of the faces, men she had enjoyed conversation with often in the past. She identified one man in particular: he had preached to her about the sinfulness of her lesbian lifestyle, threatened that God would punish her if she did not repent. She found it ironic that her heart continued to beat in her chest, but his heart had been yanked from his ribs—which now poked between the flesh of his gutted chest like a budding April flower—and resided in the stomach of a zombie. She bit her lip and continued to move up the stairs. As the spiral staircase continued to wind heavenward, the bodies began to become much more sparse. That was when the sounds came: the crunching of bones, the searing of flesh, the occasional growl as the dark-walkers above fought over the remains.