Instinct (21 page)

Tim backed up and found his shoe. It took roughly forever to untie his makeshift rope and re-lace his shoes. Tim headed back for the door that led towards the stairs.

While he slept, it seemed that the geography of the church had changed. Nothing made sense and he had to feel along each wall to find the next doorway. His hands found wooden frames and cold glass. The dog stayed pressed to his knee and helped him find the way. When he stumbled into the stairs, he was almost ready to give up hope. The dog led the way up the stairs.
 

They found the door to the street still open. It was locked at the end of its hinges. The night air felt warm and potent. The dog didn’t hesitate to walk out into the night. Tim followed.

The city was dark. The sky above them glowed with low clouds.

Around the corner, Tim found his bike still locked to the sign. He glanced over and saw the dog relieving himself against the corner of the police station. Tim looked around nervously before following suit.
 

When he swung his leg over his bike, he glanced again the dog. Now, he hoped the dog would follow. His outlook had changed completely in just a few hours. It seemed unfair to whistle to the dog though. He didn’t have any answers, and it would feel dishonest somehow—like an implicit promise—to call the dog. Instead, he pushed off and rolled away silently. When he heard the dog’s running paws keeping time with him, Tim smiled.

CHAPTER 13: VERMONT

R
OMIE
LET
THE
BLANKET
fall to the floor behind her. Rivers of dust swirled in Brad’s flashlight beam, and the smell of moldy decay filled his nose and stung his eyes. He kept the flashlight perfectly still, like it was pinning the corpse in place. The body was complying. They saw no movement.

“It must have been a trick of the…” Romie began.

CLICK.

The noise cut her off. Brad wasn’t sure, but he thought that the body’s left arm had moved. Romie took a step closer.

“What are you doing?” Pete asked from the hatch. His head was poking up over the edge of the floor.

Brad and Romie didn’t answer. They simply stared at the corpse.

Pete came up the stairs and stood next to Brad.
 

All of Brad’s attention was focused on the corpse.
 

The creaking gave away the movement before his eyes could detect it. The fingers of its left hand were trying to move. They were fighting against dehydrated muscles and mummified skin. Brad saw little puffs of dust from the fingers with each click.

“What the hell?” Pete asked.

Romie moved forward and shot her hand out. Brad couldn’t imagine what would motivate her to get that close to the corpse until he saw what she did. Romie grabbed the gun from the bed. She held it out. It wasn’t exactly pointed at the body, but it could be in a fraction of a second.

Brad heard another click and this time the dust puffed out from the thing’s stringy hair. Its head had turned a tiny bit towards Romie and the gun. Brad heard a series of tiny sounds, like clattering insects, and saw the fingers of the thing’s other hand working against its shirt.

“We should burn it,” Romie said.

“It’s like the corpses we took north. It’s like remote control. That’s not a person, it’s a puppet, and it looks like it’s not in very good working order at this point.”

“So it won’t matter if we burn it,” Romie said.

“These woods are a tinderbox,” Pete said. “And who knows what kind of attention an outdoor fire will bring.”

With the next click, Brad saw a tiny gap appear between the thing’s teeth. The jaws were opening.

“Let’s go downstairs and discuss what to do,” Brad said. He didn’t make a move towards the stairs.

“No way,” Romie said. “I’m not taking my eyes off that thing.”

With a pop, one of the legs moved.

“Maybe we could break it up and burn it in the wood stove,” Pete said.

Out of the corner of his eye, Brad saw Romie shrug.

“That’s a really disturbing idea,” Brad said.

“I think we have to do something,” Pete said.

Robby’s head appeared from below.

“Throw it out the window,” he said.
 

“Yes,” Brad said. His flashlight bobbed as he nodded in agreement with himself. “We’ll throw it out the window.”

“You’re going to touch it?” Romie asked.

Brad glanced at Pete, whose eyes were locked on the corpse.

“I guess,” Brad said, but he didn’t move.

Robby climbed up through the hatch and crossed behind Pete. He glanced at the dormer and then headed for the window at the end of the room. It was farther away, but there were less obstacles to deal with. Romie backed up and held the gun with both hands. It was pointed at an angle, down at the floor.

Pete moved forward, but stopped as Robby walked back to the body. The boy didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the corpse by the ankle and spun it on the bed.

Brad’s flesh crawled when Robby touched the thing. It creaked again. He couldn’t tell if it was trying to move, or if it was just stretching and tearing as Robby pulled it. The corpse tumbled from the bed. Romie tracked his progress by sweeping the end of the gun across the floor.
 

When the leg broke, Robby paused to adjust his grip. He pulled on the pants instead of the shin. Brad saw the corpse’s fingers straighten with another set of audible clicks.

As Robby approached the window, Pete finally broke his stasis. He trotted after the boy. Robby pulled the leg from the pants and Brad saw that it had torn free at the hip. The empty pants leg fell to the floor as Robby tossed the naked limb out the window.

Pete stood over the thing’s torso. He looked down and then looked at his own hands. He finally knelt, but didn’t touch the corpse.

Robby didn’t wait. He pulled on the other leg and slid the whole corpse closer to the window. Robby propped the remaining foot of the corpse up on the window sill and stepped around, next to Pete. That seemed to spur Pete to action. He grabbed the corpse under the shoulders and lifted.

“It’s light,” he said.
 

“Yeah,” Robby said.

Robby grabbed the empty pants leg and lifted.
 

Brad moved closer to better aim his light.

The arm popped as the hand reached towards Pete. The man gave a little yell and shoved the thing away from himself. The corpse knocked into Robby and he stumbled backwards. It tilted up and hung on the upper pane of the window. Pete kicked at it. Robby fell down.

The corpse finally tumbled out the window and Pete rushed forward to slam the window shut. He backed away, wiping his hands on his pants as Robby stood up.

“Good,” Pete said.

Brad walked forward and angled his light down through the window. He couldn’t see the ground where the thing landed.

“What are you doing up there?” Lisa called from below.

“I don’t know why that’s any better,” Romie said. “It’s not like we don’t have to worry about it just because it’s outside.”

“It can’t get in,” Pete said. “Everything is shut downstairs.”

“So we’re just going to assume that the thing obeys physics even though it just showed a total disregard for being dead?” Romie asked.

Pete shrugged.

“We’ll be okay,” Robby said. The boy moved towards the hatch. Romie looked at the blankets and pillow on the bed where the corpse had been. Everything was stained black where the thing had lain. Brad considered the blanket that Lisa had covered the thing with. He and Romie seemed to silently agree that it was soiled now too.

Brad climbed down last. He swept his light over the second floor one more time, just to be sure it didn’t hold any more secrets. He reached the first floor to see Lisa trying to get a good look through the shutters.

“We should leave, right? We have to leave,” Lisa said.

“It will be dawn soon. Everything’s more active during the day. You want to risk that?” Pete asked.

“If it means that the thing outside might be more active, then maybe we should,” Lisa said.

“We’ll be fine,” Robby said. He shook out one of the blankets that Brad had thrown down. He draped it over the back of a chair and picked up another blanket.

“Why exactly are you being so casual?” Romie asked him. “Why do you have to pretend that the dead rising up is such a normal thing? We’ve seen it exactly once, and it was a pretty goddamn dire situation.”

Robby finished with the blankets and moved on to the pillows. They only had two. A couple of people would have to lay their heads on rolled up jackets, or only their arms.

“Twice,” he said. “You’ve seen it once. I’ve seen it twice.”

Lisa looked over from the window. Pete folded his arms.

“What?” Romie asked.
 

“Thanksgiving night,” Robby said. “I was near a highway. The embryo was sending energy down the highway and it called the corpses to itself.”

“More bullshit,” Romie said. Suddenly, Brad noticed that she was still carrying the gun from upstairs. She pointed an arm in Robby’s direction. The gun wasn’t aimed at the boy, but it pointed in his direction.

Brad looked at the faces of his friends. Lisa and Pete seemed to be holding their breath. Romie was focused entirely on Robby, who was bending for the last pillow.

“That’s where I met Lyle,” Robby said. He set the pillow on the table and took a seat.

Romie gestured with the gun. “What?”

“He was at the rest stop, near the highway. I think he was mentally ill before Thanksgiving, but when everyone died and their eyes popped out, he began to think he was a god.”

“What does that have to do with the one-legged corpse that’s now outside the window?”

“Nothing, except I know what it looks like when an embryo calls to the dead. They’re like metal filings near a magnet. That corpse upstairs has probably been putting on that same show every night for a week.”

Nobody else spoke. They waited to see if Robby would offer more explanation. After a moment of silence, he did.

“There were cracks in his dried skin when we first saw him. Little cracks where the skin wasn’t elastic enough. And there was no dust on the parts that moved. There was dust around him, and in his clothes, but most of him was dust-free. He’s been moving for a while, and he never made any progress from that bed.”

“The corpses we saw were able to move just fine. They didn’t just twitch in their beds,” Romie said.

“They were relatively fresh, and we were right on the highway. Here, we’re away from the road, and the corpse was old.”

“Another crazy theory, with no way to prove or disprove.”

“The next corpse we find, assuming the person didn’t commit suicide, will have no eyes. We’re entering the band where the thing will be banking biological resources,” Robby said.

“That’s hardly a bold prediction. We’ve seen plenty of eye poppers.”

“Back east we did,” Pete said. “It’s been a long while since we’ve seen any.”

“Because we were beyond the band,” Robby said. “We’re entering a new band now.”

“Listen,” Romie said. Brad was aware that the gun came back up. “I believed your bullshit once, and it accomplished nothing. No, wait, that’s not true.” She gestured crazily with the gun. Lisa began to shrink back against the wall. “Listening to you did accomplish a few things. We lost Ted, Sheila, Nate, Brynn, and that other lady.”

“Christine,” Pete said.

“Yeah, her too,” Romie said. She swept the gun towards Pete as she acknowledge him. He flinched, but didn’t duck.

“Let’s calm down,” Lisa said. “Why don’t you have a seat, Romie?”

“He’s a teenager,” Romie said. “We’ve been listening to a teenager. Do you realize that? He wouldn’t tell us what was going to happen to the thousand corpses when we took them north, and now he’s claiming that he knew all along. After he screwed us and got half of us killed, did we hold him accountable? No! We dragged his ass across two states while he was unconscious. Do you think he knows how many times you wiped his ass?”

Robby had been calmly watching Romie during this rant. At the mention of his bodily functions, he blushed and glanced down at the floor. His eyes returned to Romie quickly, to hear the rest of her condemnation.

“But he’s just a kid, right? Shame on us for listening to him in the first place. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to listen to even more of his bullshit. He never says anything that you could use or witness. It’s always this loosey-goosey bullshit.”

Romie’s voice got louder and louder as she got worked up. She approached Robby as she talked and soon the gun was pointed at the boy. She held it at arm’s length and the barrel was no more than a foot away from his face. Brad cursed himself. Perhaps if he’d made a move for the gun earlier, when it was still aimed at the floor, he could have snatched it. Now it seemed like any move would end with Romie pulling the trigger.

Robby held his ground. He didn’t back away or break eye-contact with the woman. Brad wished he would. Maybe if the boy gave in to Romie’s accusations, she would take pity on him.