Chapter Forty-Two

Richard woke from a mixture of sleep and stunned agony. He’d landed on a pile of wet boxes—or what he believed to be wet boxes until his senses kicked on. He’d landed on freshly dead corpses. Piles of them. They were staff members from the second floor. He was smeared and drenched in gore. Thirty of the dead corpses glared back at him with fishy, reflective eyes. The victims had been mercilessly slaughtered. He was soaked in red, shivering and chilled to the core. He attempted to rise, but the ceiling was so low that he couldn’t.

Fighting against his revulsion, he crawled through the mess of bodies. He couldn’t look down in the fear of recognizing one of them.

A door was opened. A square of white, blinding light shone forth. The skeletal bodies of many zombies reached in and began dragging the corpses out, the assembly line working efficiently to clean out the storage room.

They would find him.

Slaughter him.

Eat him.

Turn back. Turn back now!

Richard swam upstream, treading against lips, faces, breasts, chests, genitals and exposed regions of innards. He disconnected himself from his body and focused on surviving. At the backmost section of the compartment, he glued himself to the wall, slumping down to become smaller.

The grunt and snap of dead men’s bones marked their efforts to empty the compartment of death. Some of the zombies couldn’t resist their urges and feasted on the fresher, less used-up bodies.

What if everybody had already been murdered? Would he be stranded here? Starve to death? Could he navigate through miles upon miles of ocean to another land? Could the monsters? Or worse yet, would he be discovered in his pitiful hiding place and become another victim?

He waited, stiff against the wall. The zombies began to crawl on hands and knees to pull the other bodies free. The compartment was at a tilt, the blood trapped in the bodies streaming down to him and pooling two inches high. He winced, holding his breath and pinching his nose so as not to vomit.

Richard nearly yelped when a body rolled onto him. It was a woman’s body. She was soaked through and through in blood, her features a red glaze without definition.

The zombie closest to him grumbled. Its hands and feet clopped against puddles as it worked to claim the woman’s body. Closer it came, edging ever so near. He could smell it now. The true rot was inside the dead man’s bowels. What he ate had festered and stewed inside him.

He turned to view the approaching dead man. He realized it was a female zombie. The collarbone and chest were visible through the dark brown flesh, the pieces brittle and slimy. The lone eye swam in cottony white fluids, the whites yellowed. Richard couldn’t tell if the woman could see him or if the eye was affixed in a permanent stare. He couldn’t risk being sighted either way.

He was unarmed, so he attacked the best way possible. He reached out and clamped his fingers into her throat. The fingers delved into the skin that was as soft a rotten pumpkin’s dermis. Gnashing, digging and clamping, the effort caused his fingers to slip through the soap-slick mess and decapitate the woman.

He prayed she’d finally know the afterlife. Even for the abominations, he wished them a peaceful final slumber. A chance at heaven that everybody deserved.

He waited for a reaction. Nobody peeked into the chamber.

Richard wouldn’t move until he was certain the zombies were gone.

Show yourselves, damn you.

He was about to crawl out when two new heads poked into the entrance. They studied the area. If they crawled in, more would follow. He’d lose the battle, being outnumbered.

The heads watched without reacting.

I’ll kill each of them with my bare hands if I have to.

But he wouldn’t have to. The zombies turned back, throwing the hatch closed. He listened to the patter of feet and the drag of bodies. Richard could easily speculate they were traveling to the surface. Would they have a wild feast before leaving the island? The ocean trek was as unpredictable as it was unsafe. They would tank up on food before taking on the ocean.

He crawled up to the hatch and went to work kicking and battering the wood into pieces. The wood was wet and rotted in sections, easily breached. Touching down to the other side, Richard scanned the area around him. The hallway was clear, but in the distance, he sensed the zombies trudging into carved-out tunnels. The tunnels were as extensive as they were a maze. Every tunnel and hall was crude, the instruments used to hollow the walls limited to pickaxes, knives and silverware. He kept to a single hall, moving onward at a careful pace. He sensed others throughout the sublevel.

He stopped at the bend of the hall. The hole he spotted ahead reminded him of an empty pool at the deep end, possibly six feet deep. Blood was draining quickly from the bottom. Where it was being carried, he couldn’t guess. Who drained it was another good question.

He skipped to the other side of the pool. The rooms were closed off except for one. He wanted to inspect it, though the chamber was ill-illuminated. Fresh blood wetted the concrete, a colorful medley of reds, blacks and maroons everywhere.

It could be the way out. I haven’t heard screams yet. The monsters haven’t reached the surface. There’s still time to warn everybody.

He crossed through to the nearest door and met a set of stairs. His eyes adjusted better to the corridor. The room wasn’t empty. He noticed the fissure in the wall, then the cubbyhole only half his size. Hearing movement below the stairs, he curled himself up in the cubby to hide.

Moments later, packs of wolves, zombies and vampires united to lift out the stock of boats below the stairs. They marched up the concrete steps, passing inches from him. The fleet was removed, the chamber emptied in a matter of ten minutes.

The monsters were gone.

“Whuuh! Whuuh! Whuuh!”

Somebody sputtered and coughed from below. He waited it out. The splash of water and a wet thack against the surface. The person kept choking and gasping for breath. Richard struggled out of his position and checked the outside hallway. The monsters weren’t coming back, he decided.

Richard peered over the stairway, and who he caught splayed on the ground sent him from the room. But the victim cried out, “Wait—don’t run!”

He returned against his better judgment. There was the man who had commanded Grace Mooney to deliver him to the wolf arena for imminent slaughter. Brenner, the inhuman beast who murdered his agents. But Brenner was heavily wounded. His clothing was in shreds, the skin a mesh of bone and minced tissue. He was deathly pale and barely able to slump against the wall.

The man eyed him with a level of admission. “Yes,” he gasped. “I wanted you dead. I can’t lie. But my power over the island has been dissolved. They’ve changed. Even I can’t battle them, even being one of them.”

“What are you saying?”

“My mutation’s been nothing short of ripped from me, but a part of the monster still exists.”

Out from his jugular vein, a snake-like prong slithered through a gill slit opening in the flesh. It was suspended taut in the air, the circular-toothed mouth gaping open and ready to feast. The material of its body was sinew, veins and flesh. “What the hell is it?”

“Those monsters have my blood in their bodies,” Brenner whispered. “They’ll change in the future…they’ll have my abilities. Tonight, perhaps. I thought you betrayed me, Richard. But the Secretary of Defense, the head of the PSA, they were giving you orders behind my back. You were simply trying to secure the island from the monster threat. I took it as an immediate threat to my existence. Ending the island would be the end of me.

“The PSA betrayed us both. They’ve been keeping in contact with James Sorelli. Harry Truman must’ve wanted to keep a short leash on him. The government wants the monsters to escape the island. James spouted many reasons, but he mainly said it’d be an economic shot in the arm if a war happened that everybody could get on the boat about—and I’m not talking about a war to get Americans united, I’m talking about the entire United Nations. Even the terrorists would be raising up American flags after a war of such a caliber. It’s a heck of a plan. Maybe a desperate and insane plan, but even Iceland and France would be shoving their guns up the monsters’ asses if this breaks out.”

Richard was jolted. “We can end this right here on the island. Kill them all. Fuck the PSA’s plan.”

“You haven’t been attacked one-on-one by them.” Brenner laughed bitterly. “You know nothing of how they’ve changed. They slaughtered me, and I’m better than them—or at least I once was. How will you fare against them?”

Richard said, “I don’t plan on exchanging fisticuffs with these assholes. Fine, let the monsters escape to the United States if that’s what they want. But these people on the island have sacrificed their lives, families, friends and sanities for those government bastards. Now we call the shots over our lives.”

Brenner lowered his head, his eye half-open. “They won’t leave without killing each and every one of you. The trek is long in those shitty, makeshift boats they’ve built. They’re hungry already. And they will have a war on their hands the moment they step on American soil. Each of us will perish by tonight.”

Richard was bombarded by conflicting ideas. He couldn’t fight them. He must fight them. He wanted to retreat. There was nowhere to retreat. Innocent lives had to be saved. There was no weapon capable of defeating them. “Fine; then I’ll at least warn them. We die trying to save ourselves. All of them up there can’t hide. Hell, they’ve already slaughtered the second-floor crew. I found their bodies piled up in this corridor. Zombies came to drag them outside. God knows what those assholes are thinking.”

Blood pooled under Brenner’s body. He wouldn’t live much longer. A grin expanded over his lips, mischievous and delighted by an idea. He was keeping a secret.

“What’re you thinking about? Spit it out.”

Brenner’s eye bent into a slit. The smile refused to wane. He was drunk on blood loss. “It’s over for me. But there is a way to fight them.”

“Then speak up,” Richard insisted. “If you don’t, I’m leaving right now.”

“Oh, it won’t take that long. All you have to do is listen to me.”