Chapter Fifty

After Addey woke up, they climbed up the exit hatch in the back of the control room and arrived at the boarding dock at the south end of the complex. The wooden planks were sun baked and warm to the touch, though the sun was a dying ember on the horizon. They’d waited hours before deciding to go topside, and nightfall would be soon.

Sea salt drifted up to her nostrils, thick and snuffing as a sheet. What also drifted was the concentration of copper and expiring meat, of death on the air. But the essence of blood failed to curl her stomach anymore. Her mouth watered. Her body tightened and quaked. She was growing. Changing. Mutating.

The veins under her arms grouped together. They writhed and breathed and lived separate from her. These things festered within her, but they lay dormant for the moment.

She asked Richard. “H-how long has it been?”

He was removed from his deep thoughts. “It’s been two hours. They haven’t busted through the hatch. They have no idea we’re here.”

“For how long…?”

“Yeah, for how long?” He smiled. “We’re going to survive this together.”

She said with disdain, “So we’re going to fight them?”

“That was the plan, if we can pull it off.”

Without any indication of it happening, their view went vertical. The end posts of the dock exploded, the columns crashing into the water. Claws and battering fists reached for them, the things shooting up from the water for the kill.

“Hold on!”

Faces peeked from the surface, wolfish snouts gushing mucous and spit. Zombies clasped onto floating rafters and reached out to them with bony fingers. Vampires scaled closer to them, their eyes buzzing with energy and bloodlust. But before anything could harm them, the dock completely capsized, dumping them into the water. Richard was lost in the rush of activity, and she spun backward in a forced flip and landed headfirst in the frothy blue waters. The salt water stung her eyes and the nasty taste burned her mouth, each compelling her to thrash back to the surface, though her body felt lead-heavy. Trying to reach the top, her arms and legs were clasped to pull her back down under. Many were zombies, their faces sloughing off in the busy waters. She couldn’t fight back. Her air was growing thin.

She was four sidestrokes from reaching air. She could see the light flicker on the surface, urging her on. Precious air she required. She shouted, spitting bubbles and froth and not getting any breaths. The zombies were peeling out her stitches with their teeth. Above her, wolves were seconds from pulling her down even deeper. Down deep for good. Vampires flanked east and west of her, their eyes glowing neon green and red as if paving the way for the others to locate her.

This is how I’m going to die.

Her vision blurred, the lack of oxygen limiting her impulses. She stopped batting her arms, so weak feeling.

A water-muffled shriek resounded feet from her. “Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaagh!”

The projections shot out at the wolf, bringing it down into the water with her. They dug so deep into the wolf's body, turning it inside out. The beast was instantly dead. Next, the projections latched onto the incoming vampires’ necks and heaved them upward. The coils released the vampires, the whiplash effect snapping their necks. She could hear the break of spine and the scrape of vertebra against vertebra. In a whirlwind of action, the snakes wrapped around a collection of zombies’ necks and tore through them in one finalizing jerk. She opened her eyes to catch sight of a dozen rotting heads floating past her body to the top.

Richard grabbed hold of her and lifted her topside. She reached the surface, sucking in air. Her body reawoke, recharged by the gulps of air. The surface was covered in wave after wave of bodies swimming to reach them. Jeers, screams, barks, howls, cries of joy, threats and guttural belches dominated the air. Claps of bodies pounding water were deafening and rising. Hundreds surrounded them.

“We,” Richard gasped between breaths of air, “we have to keep fighting. They’ll devour us otherwise.”

They finally swam onto a muddy bank. Staying there for a moment, Addey studied him. He was stronger. Thicker. Blood flowed in abundance in his system. She could almost hear it, a subtle rush of fluids. His eyes were bloodshot, slowly turning red without the iris or the pupil.

“Can you move on your own?”

She struggled to her feet, and standing up shortly afterward, she answered his question. “Yes. Yes, I can.”

She was frightened at how much blood gushed from her legs from the broken stitching. It painted the rocks, painted everything she came in contact with. Richard eyed her body with savage intent. He was craving blood, and so was she. That’s why she was grateful when the first vampire shot out of the water after them. Midair, four projections exploded from her ribs and punctured the vampire in the chest, throat, heart and neck. He was sucked halfway of fluids, then desiccated and dry before he crashed onto the rocks.

“That’s it, Addey. Fight them!”

They raced to a level playing field. The courtyard was mixed with strewn monsters and humans alike, turned inside out, picked clean of worth, shot through and turned to pulp and mush. Addey made it a point to stomp on a wolf’s severed head, jelly and gore squishing out of every orifice. Her body was thick with coursing blood, her own and the vampire’s. She was becoming something other than herself. Creature. Abomination. Powerhouse.

The fleet was charging up the hill, hundreds wide, perhaps a thousand total. They raged closer, dangerously close, when Richard’s body shot out twenty projections, each wriggling and pulsing with muscles, the ends circular maws of gnashing, wild teeth. They crawled beneath her skin, shifting muscle and rooted to the bone. She could feel them at work.

Without her willing it, a projection exploded out from both her shoulders. Another set launched out of her wrists. Her femoral artery and jugular vein opened up to unleash another two. Four pairs crawled out from her lungs. Two out her back. She was a cannibalistic medusa monster.

Extending out ten feet, the living coils gouged out eyes, slit throats, rendered limbs from bodies. They were especially inclined to tear heads off. Forty had gone down, and not one monster had touched them. Richard’s form was buried under fleshy snakes writhing and attacking from all corners of his body. She couldn’t see him anymore. Now she couldn’t even see herself. Blood and severed limbs and breaking bones and cut-short screams became her world. The monsters kept coming in greater numbers. There was more blood coming, more sustenance to reap. Blood fattened her limbs, as did the muscles that circulated and fueled her creatures.

She caught Richard flanked from the back, six werewolves pounding him to the ground. The projections shot out to their hunched and hairy backs, but not before the wolves tore four of the creatures from his body, the snakes thrown across the courtyard, spewing gallons of blood and issuing a rasp-shriek of defeat: shaaaaa-reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh!

He was wounded and tackled by dozens of mixed monsters, overwhelmed. She couldn’t do anything to help him, her body controlled by the creatures. Addey watched in mortal terror as Richard’s limbs were crudely removed from him until he was just a head and a torso.

“RICHARD!”

Her shouts did no good.

The man was dead.

She was surrounded.

But then the groups relented. Stepping back from her for an unknown reason, they departed to the edge of the ocean. Manning their boats, they filled up their vessels and took sail.

It wasn’t long before she felt the urge to leave with them. The human inside the monster wanted to keep fighting, but the lust for blood seized hold of her wits. The moment Richard was murdered, it seemed easier to let go of everything.

The monsters knew she was finally one of them, as did she.

Joining the throng, she boarded one of the ships. The scent of human beings drifted ever so faintly in the air. They used their insatiable lust for meat and blood as a compass and steered in the direction of the United States.