The lobby room seemed much longer than it had as they ran across the floor. Behind them, she was sure the creatures were dropping silently to the floor. She could only hear them when their bone-claws scraped the tiles. They could have been twenty feet away, or ten, or maybe ten inches. They could have been close enough to grab her by the hair and yank her back, sinking those flesh-rending talons into her body. She wanted to look back, but she didn’t. She couldn’t afford to lose any ground.
After what seemed like a disproportionate amount of time, the doorway loomed ahead of them. Kathy and the others shot through it—she wished there was a door to close behind them–and tumbled out into the street. They staggered away from the building, and only then did they finally turn to see the progress of their pursuers.
There were dozens, maybe hundreds, of the creatures clamoring toward the doorway.
“Shit!” Rodriguez shouted, nearly tripping himself over street debris as he backed away. “Shit! Shit!”
Then the creatures stopped short in the doorway. Kathy and the others held their breath, waiting for the outpouring…but it didn’t come. They crowded the top of the doorway, a whirlwind of flailing, multi-jointed limbs and twitching, cratered heads of waving jagged skin and spiny teeth.
“What are they doing?” Hornsby asked.
A few of the creatures reached around the door frame to move out into the night, but then they skittered back, as if the outside air hurt them.
“They stopped. They…I don’t think they can come out here.” Kathy took a step toward them and their keening rose until it was deafening, the shrieks of a multitude. They didn’t come out, though.
“Let’s go. Whatever’s holding them back might not be permanent.”
“Good idea,” Markham said. He looked pale, and was bleeding through his bandage a little.
They took off away from the library, following the moonlit street until it banked to the left and they found themselves on a side street. It was hard for Kathy to shake the feeling that they were still being followed, and as they leaned against a wrongly-slanted building to catch their breath, she watched for signs of those creatures, but there were none. Whatever kept them in the city library seemed to be holding.
“Think we’re okay for now,” Jose said, panting, his hands on his knees. He straightened up. “Where to now?”
Kathy peered down the long side street. It was devoid of debris; there was no one there to leave any. She gestured toward the other end. “That way, I guess? You said you found the city center when you got lost, right? So let’s get lost.”
In agreement, Hornsby and Jose made a move to follow her suggestion, but stopped when they saw Markham. He was leaning heavily against an obtuse angle of the building across from Kathy, almost laying on it, cradling his bad arm. His forehead had broken out into a sweat and he looked even paler than before.
“Sergeant, you okay?”
Markham, whose eyes had been closed, opened them suddenly. He looked as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. “I’m fine, I said. Just a little warm from running.”
“Sit,” Kathy told him. When he looked about to protest, she commanded it; her tone leaving no room for argument. “Sit down, Sergeant Markham.”
He regarded her a moment, nodded, and then sank to the ground. She went to him, opening her backpack as she did so. He seemed to have lost his in the flight from the library. She handed him one of her little bottles of water. “Drink that,” she told him in the same inarguable voice, and he did. Then she took another small water out of her bag and knelt down beside him, unwrapping his bandage.
“What are you doing?” he asked, weakly trying to pull his arm away.
She kept unwrapping the bandage anyway. “We should clean those scratches.” She was going to add, “to prevent infection,” but she didn’t think either she or Markham was quite ready to admit out loud that particular ship had sailed. Infection had begun to take root, she was pretty sure, and although she didn’t really think pouring water on it could help, she was pretty sure it wouldn’t hurt, either.
The skin around the scratches had taken on a pale, washed-out bluish tint, the skin there thin, almost like tissue paper. As she poured water over the scratches, black blood streamed over his forearm onto the ground and was replaced by new red rivulets. That, Kathy thought, seemed like a good sign. Maybe infection hadn’t gotten such a foothold yet. She took the antibiotic salve out of her backpack and squeezed a generous amount from the tube onto Markham’s scratches. With his free hand, he rubbed them in.
“Thanks.” He smiled weakly at her.
She took out the sewing kit. “Would you like me to sew those up?”
“I’ve got it.” Markham took the sewing kit and offered her a weak smile. “Not the first time I’ve patched myself up.”
Kathy helped him thread and rethread the needle when he needed it, but otherwise, he did an admirable job of sewing closed those angry furrows. Kathy could see the pain in his eyes and in the tension of his body language, but he said nothing the entire time.
“Let’s get that rewrapped,” she said, and, replacing the salve and sewing kit in her bag, she pulled out a roll of bandages.
“Thank you, Ms. Ryan,” he said.
“Kathy. Just Kathy is fine.” She found herself blushing a little. Caregiver was not a role she had ever really been comfortable with, nor was it one she thought she did well, so the genuine gratitude in his voice threw her a little. Still, she managed a small smile at him. When Markham’s arm was rewrapped and he’d had a few more sips of water from the bottle she’d given him, he looked a little better. Although he was still pale, his color had begun to come back a bit, and he’d stopped sweating.
Jose and Hornsby helped Markham to his feet.
“Let’s keep moving,” Markham said. “I’ll feel better putting one foot in front of the other.”
They moved as a group down the side street in the direction Kathy had suggested, trying to look for significant landmarks or indications of life without looking too closely or too long at the building faces. Particularly on the street onto which they emerged, a main thoroughfare judging by the width of it, the buildings hemming them in from both sides had that disconcerting stucco surface. In the moonlight, faces leered and bore stone teeth. The wind had picked up some, too, and as it rushed past their ears, it sometimes sounded like whispering. At first, Kathy could only catch occasional words—slaughter…rape…eviscerate…betray…but as they made their way further along the desolate avenue, the words came faster, and she could understand more of them.
They suggested terrible things. Unthinkable, unspeakable, stomach-turning things amidst hiss-like chuckling and high-pitched, mad giggles.
Slaughter her…rape the little ones…eviscerate…betrayal of…peel off layers of the eyes…flay the back slowly…break the souls…
One of the voices whispered, to break you…make you just like me.
“Do you guys hear that?” Hornsby asked tentatively, but the whispering had grown surprisingly loud. It wasn’t just in Kathy’s ears now; it felt like a buzzing inside her whole head. Was this the beginning of infection, or were they just surrounded by those things, those parasite faces? She looked at the others. Jose was blinking and shaking his head and Markham was pinching the bridge of his nose; both looked to her like they were consumed by the whispering as well. The one who seemed the least affected was Hornsby. By his expression, Kathy guessed he realized that, too. He didn’t waste time with the information, though; as Markham staggered forward, he bore the man up with a shoulder under his arm.
“Rodriguez! Kathy! Let’s move!” He hurried Markham down toward another side street.
Kathy could tell he was right, that they should get out of there, but the whispering was telling her other things, and she found it exhausting—so much so that her legs and arms felt heavy. It was easier just to stand and sway. There were so many whispering voices in her head now that she didn’t even have to hear the awful things they were saying. She got the gist of it, but the terrible mind-movies the thoughts suggested had run their reel.
She noticed Hornsby had come back without Markham and meant to comment, but it was too much effort to talk. Deep in her mind, she knew this was wrong, this lethargy. Alarms were going off in the distance of her thoughts, and although this sent part of her brain on lockdown, another part was fighting not to lose herself, to follow after Hornsby, who had taken both her and Jose by the arm and was half leading and half dragging them in the direction in which he’d taken Markham.
As they moved, the air seemed cooler, freer, and the whispering faded. By degrees, Kathy felt more alert, more herself, and by the time the three of them reached Markham, who was sitting hunched over on a large front stoop, the whispering had dissipated entirely. Jose seemed better, too, and Hornsby looked relieved.
“Thank you,” she told the police officer. “I think you might have just saved our lives.”
“Any time.” He was eyeing Markham, and that concern had crept back into his face again. To her and Jose, he said, “I don’t think he’s doing so well.”
“I’m…fine,” Markham said. It seemed like a strain to talk. The wound on his arm had begun oozing again, both fresh blood and something that looked like bronchitis phlegm.
“You need more antibiotic.”
“It won’t work,” Markham said, looking up. His expression was laced with pain. “It’s gone deep, whatever it is.”
“What can we do?” Jose asked.
“The arm should come off,” Markham replied. “Stop the infection before it spreads.”
“Are you serious?” Jose looked at him as if the fever had already begun to boil Markham’s brains.
“No way to do that,” Hornsby said. “Between the four of us, we have, what? A pocket knife?”
“There are shards of broken stone in the buildings—not just the library. They’ll cut through muscle, I’m sure of it. They might even be heavy enough to break through the bone. Like a guillotine.” Markham coughed hard. When he recovered, he studied the skeptical looks on their faces and sighed. “Look. I don’t know if that thing was poisonous or if it was just filthy with alien germs, but these wounds are deep, and they’re infected. The infection is spreading. I can feel it. It’s going up my arm, and if it makes it to my brain or my heart…Cut off the arm, and I might still be able to fight it off.”
“Markham, man, I’ll be honest with you,” Jose said. “I don’t know if it’s in me to do that. I don’t know if any of us can do that.”
Markham turned to Kathy. “You have to,” he said. “Or I’ll die here.”
All three men watched her, waiting.
“Sergeant, we have nothing to dull the pain, and—”
“It can’t hurt worse than it already does,” he said through a grimace.
“And no way to cauterize the wound. If you bleed to death—”
“We’ll make a fire,” Hornsby said.
“And what if the laws of physics here don’t allow for fire to exist?”
“There is oxygen in the air here,” Jose said. “We tested for that, to make sure we could breathe.”
“How far up would we have to cut?” Kathy asked.
“Above the elbow should do it,” Markham said.
Kathy nodded. “We can search this building here. We’ll need to find wood to make a fire. If we find an appropriate stone, we can sterilize it in the flames, and cauterize his wound. We’ll need to pool our antibiotic salve. You guys okay with that?”
Jose and Hornsby nodded.
“Can you guys get Sergeant Markham to his feet? Let’s get out of the street.”
“Kathy.” Markham grabbed her arm with his good hand. His grip was still surprisingly strong. “Again…thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” she said softly. “I’ve never done an amputation before.”
* * * *
The building they entered was bigger inside than the library had been, although the first room they entered looked as if it had been swept clean. Immediately, they were on guard. If a place that looked as if time and space had abandoned it had been teeming with monsters, then a place far less dusty and cluttered with debris seemed even less likely to be empty.
It was hard to tell what the building might once have been used for. Unlike the library or what Kathy thought had been residences, this place had no furniture whatsoever. The walls were smooth, much smoother than anywhere else; there were no faces here, no whispering or humming. The silence within seemed so intent on remaining unbroken that even their footsteps were muted, and their voices, when they did speak, were hushed.
There was only one doorway, and that was on the far wall, about three football fields away.
Remnants of a door still hung from the doorway under which they passed, swinging a little on perfectly silent hinges attached to the top of the frame. The fragment of door looked heavy and very loose. Kathy hoped it would hold at least until they were out from under it.
Beyond the doorway was a stone antechamber just before a staircase curving down into the ground. It reminded Kathy of the throats of those library creatures, a gaping maw and stone-ringed gullet spiraling toward the pit of this world’s gut.
They exchanged glances with one another and one by one, they filed down the stairs.
Kathy wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the silence deepened as they descended. There was no echo, no shuffling sound. They couldn’t see, either. They had pulled out the tiny flashlights they had been given in the backpacks, but found that each offered a brief flicker of light before giving over to darkness, and not one of the four could be induced to light up again. Jose made a comment about Paragon technology, but the stairwell nearly swallowed it up.
They did their best to feel their way, that same smooth stone winding around and down, but after a while, the texture beneath their fingertips changed from smooth to rough and back again, and then on to no real sensation at all. At first, Kathy thought the wall had dropped away, that they were balanced uncertainly on a staircase suspended over an endless chasm in the all-encompassing darkness, but she found she couldn’t extend her arm. Something structural prevented it. It wasn’t any less disconcerting, though. It felt to Kathy as if they were slipping down into a kind of waking unconsciousness.
Kathy and Jose supported Markham, with Hornsby bringing up the rear. She could hear Markham’s breathing growing more ragged. That she could hear it at all surprised her…and struck her as a bad sign. They were losing Markham fast.
“Are you okay, Sergeant? Need to stop a minute?” Her words sounded muffled in her own ears, snatched out of the air.
“Keep going,” Markham said. At least, that’s what Kathy thought he said.
She did keep going, following the massive stairs down into the depths of an alien world. The buildings, sizable as they were, had felt like they were pressing on her, but the stairwell felt suffocating. She was breathing the place in, and it was crushing her.
She was just about to suggest they turn around and go back up, get out of that heavy, choking, crushing nothingness, when she rounded a bend and saw a faint light blue glow lighting up what looked to be the bottom of the staircase.
“I think we found the bottom,” she said. She could feel the rock again under her fingertips and could hear her own voice normally. When she reached flat ground again, a tension she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying eased, and she could breathe again. Markham stumbled a little on the bottom step, but seemed better than he had on the staircase. Jose and Hornsby emerged from the dark. They had made it.
“So now what? Keep going and hope to find something sharp?” Jose looked around.
They were in a dirt tunnel supported by wooden beams. One of the beams had fallen and begun to splinter on the ground. There was promise there—broken wood for a fire, possible jagged rocks beyond it, unearthed by whoever had dug the tunnel.
“Let’s keep going a little farther, see what we can use down here,” Kathy said.
The tunnel looked longer than it actually was. They closed the distance within minutes and emerged into a room the size of a suburban neighborhood with a ceiling six or seven stories high. Inside, it was several degrees colder than the tunnel. Like everywhere else in the city, the room was made of stone, but it was utterly smooth—flawlessly so. It was clearly octagon-shaped, another architectural anomaly in the dead city. Set into six of the walls were countless massive metal drawers with T-shaped handles, arranged in rows. Against one of the free walls was a kind of counter slanting downward, and on it was laid out a number of bright silver instruments at least as large as Markham, if not larger. Although none of them was recognizable to Kathy, she saw that many had scroll-shaped handles and s-shaped blades. The light blue glow was coming from orbs in the ceiling, and unlike other light sources around the city, these were extremely bright, almost harsh. They were focused in groups over enormous stone slabs with crisscrossed legs on wheels. The slabs had grimy fabric sheets draped over them, and Kathy could see that a few covered irregular contents laid out on the slabs.
“Oh my God,” Jose said, crossing himself. He had figured it out just as Kathy did.
“It’s a morgue,” Kathy said flatly. “We found a morgue.”