Eaters (24 page)

He held the torch out in front as he walked towards the back corner of the cabin. She followed, her finger ready on the trigger.

They’d gone about ten feet when it became obvious that there would be no easy escape. There was a loud thud behind them—the first Eater dropping out of the bathroom window. And worse, on the far side of the cabin, near the entrance to the garage, there was the sickening sound of shuffling feet and deep moans.

Fire or firepower?
She wondered which would be more likely to protect them and if either would be enough. She decided that it depended on how many they encountered before they made it to the garage.

The answer came far too quickly when they rounded the corner.
Twenty? Thirty? Fifty?
Cheryl couldn’t tell for sure how far back the crowd went. The stench was worse than a feedlot, and it looked as if a graveyard had been raided by a mad scientist and all its inhabitants had been brought back to life from all stages of decay. A few of them were naked, shreds of white breasts and appendages, highlighted by the moon’s glow as they advanced. Others were clothed in bloodstained t-shirts with microbrewery or sports team logos, torn skirts, or underwear. Some had sunken-in gelled eyes, while others had opaque orbs, or nothing but empty black eye sockets. They moved together like one organism, arms outstretched, moaning the same hollow tune, composed of discordant notes of agony.

Aidan swung the torch in an arc, but the bright flame did not make them hesitate. They kept relentlessly advancing.

“Get back!” Aidan yelled, swinging the torch furiously like he meant to beat them with it.

When they still seemed to have no fear, Cheryl flanked to his right and opened fire. Aiming for heads, she sprayed a shower of bullets through the group. Some fell, some simply flinched as if they’d been slapped, and far too many didn’t seem affected at all.

She saw Aidan struggling with the decision of whether to hold on to the torch or abandon it to have two hands for his gun. Just then she heard a piercing wail just a few feet behind her. She whipped around and saw more Eaters closing in.

In the narrow space, just a few feet wide between the cabin and the garage,
they were trapped.

Her gun quickly knocked out a third of them, but, just as she’d discovered with Barry, anything less than a direct hit to the brainpan had little effect. She blasted them again, knocking out a couple more, but the Eater in front—a creature who had once been a young woman but was now a walking corpse with a jerking head a nest of snake-like intestines hanging out above her bloody bikini bottom—seemed impervious to the gunfire.

Cheryl heard Aidan’s hoarse screams behind her right before she fired another round into the woman’s body. The gunshots made pockmarks in her bare flesh as she danced like a marionette, but they didn’t knock her down. Her bony fingers came closer, aiming for Cheryl’s neck, grabbing the air like they were already scooping up fistfuls of flesh.

Kill her with the lamp.

She didn’t question Mark’s voice—she knew what he meant.

Turning the gun around, she held onto the searing hot barrel. When the Eater was two feet away, she swung it like a baseball bat, smashing into her skull with all her might. The body crashed to the ground, twitched for a second, then began to get back up. Cheryl jumped up in the air and slammed down on the Eater’s head with Mark’s oversized combat boots, and every ounce of her hundred and twenty-six pounds.

The head collapsed like a rotten watermelon, spraying an oil-like slick of dark blood in all directions.

There were still more coming at her. Realizing that she didn’t have the strength to take them all one by one in the same manner, she turned the gun around and fired again. This time, she carefully aimed right between their eyes (or the center of their faces where their eyes used to be). To her relief, they fell in succession like ducks in a carnival game, but her sense of accomplishment evaporated when she saw more filling in the ranks of those who’d fallen.

The situation looked even worse when she turned back around and saw Aidan’s predicament.

Two of that pack were on fire, flailing around with waving arms. They didn’t scream in pain or try to put out the flames. Instead,
they were still reaching for Aidan and trying to grab him.
He backed up, still holding the torch, and fumbling to maneuver his gun with one hand.

Realizing that the fire was doing little good to keep them at bay, she yelled, “Put it down!”

Aidan turned towards her; his bright green eyes were wild with fear and had tiny dancing flames reflected in each.

“The torch. Put it down!”

He tossed it to the ground, and they both opened fire. A shower of blood, brain, and bone fragments filled the air, illuminated by flashes of gunfire. With each body that fell, they advanced a few more inches, warily stepping over corpses that were uncertain to stay dead.

Close calls came in succession as ghouls flanked them on the left and right, somehow avoiding direct hits. In between shots, they used their boots, elbows, and gun barrels to knock them back, slamming heads into the walls of the cabin and garage, and even kicking a couple of bodies into the fire that the torch had started—the fire that was now spreading and threatening to cut them off from the garage.

Cheryl didn’t know how they were going to get around the flames that now licked up from the ground, waist high, fueled by the dry grass. The area near the cabin was blocked, and there was less than two feet of clearance between the fire and the garage wall.

It had been her idea to throw the torch down. Now, she realized that it may have been a fatal mistake.

Aidan began moving towards their only escape route. She knew they only had a couple of seconds to get through that hole before it was completely choked off. A hulking Eater, a man with an enormous belly and a bloodstained beard, began to stumble into the narrow opening. If they shot him, he might take too long to fall or block their path with his enormous body when he keeled over.

Her pounding heart skipped a beat when she saw Aidan hunch over and realized what he was planning to do;
he was going to try to charge the man like a bull and knock him back.
If he failed, the Eater would likely grab him by the head and gouge out his first bite as the flames consumed them both.

There was only a second for her to worry before Aidan shouldered his rifle and shot off head first like a rocket towards the man’s belly.

They connected, and the Eater stumbled backwards two steps, but didn’t lose his balance. The flames were just inches away from Aidan’s boots as infected hands reached for him and he backed up.

Cheryl raised her gun and shot a volley of shots at the Eater’s head, praying that Aidan kept low enough to avoid them. Pieces of the giant’s skull flew off and he began to wobble. Aidan saw him teetering in his direction and tried to kick out a leg to deflect him, but he wasn’t strong enough to push him back. The lumbering corpse fell forward, pinning Aidan against the garage wall, as flames curled up its huge thighs.

“Aidan!”

Hearing a moan right behind her shoulder, she whipped around and butted a rotten jawbone with her gun barrel. When she turned back around, there was a ball of fire covering the dead man’s body, and she couldn’t see Aidan at all.

There was a surge of nausea in the pit of her stomach as she realized that she was all alone. She turned and shot a couple more Eaters coming up from behind and seriously considered turning the gun on herself.

You promised you’d keep going…

She was about to tell Mark’s voice in her head that she’d had enough and preferred to die by her own hand rather than be eaten alive when she heard the sound of gunfire followed by a shout.

“Cheryl!”

It was Aidan. She saw him now. He stood on the other side of the fire waving one arm and his gun in the air to get her attention, motioning for her to come towards him.

Through the fire?

She wondered if she was hallucinating.

He was frantic now, screaming as he pointed over her shoulder. She turned and fired a shot with few seconds to spare before she’d have been bitten.

He saved me. He must be real.

“Jump!”

The flames in the middle where the grass had burned up were lower—about sixteen inches high. With a running start, she figured that she could jump it, but she hoped to hell that Mark’s camouflage uniform was flame retardant.

She fired more shots behind her and backed up. Seeing Aidan’s duffel bag lying on the ground, she grabbed it and threw the strap over her shoulder. It was heavy from all the guns and ammunition inside, and she knew it wouldn’t help her clearance, but without weapons, she knew that they wouldn’t get much farther in their quest for survival.

Praying for wings, she ran and leapt. Her boots just cleared over the fire, and she fell to the ground on the other side.

When she stood, she saw Aidan running into the burning garage and followed him in. She saw him go to the Harley and put on the leather jacket lying over the seat and her face fell when she realized that the bike was his goal all along. He’d never intended to take the truck, because he wasn’t going to leave the motorcycle behind any more than she intended to abandon the last fragment of Mark’s shirt. It was a piece of him—the only thing he had left of himself—and she understood that.

Still, thinking of how narrowly they escaped with their lives on the way up the mountain, the thought of charging through all those grabbing infected hands and merciless teeth with nothing but the cool air surrounding them made her uneasy.

“Lock the door!”

She shut the door behind her and turned the lock just before a charred hand made it through. Then she looked up nervously at the flickering fluorescent light bulb overhead, and the smoke pouring in from the burning wall.

“Put this on,” Aidan said, tossing his dead girlfriend’s helmet to her—the same one that had kept most of her head intact on the way up the mountain.

She dropped the bag and fumbled with the strap, but couldn’t get it fastened with her shaky fingers. He came over to help, and their eyes met for a second, a glance that contained a thousand unsaid words and emotions. He lifted her chin and gave her a tender kiss on the lips. “Hey, we’re going to make it through this.”

She desperately wanted to hug him, to talk…

But there was no time.

She could already feel the garage getting hotter and feel the burn of the acrid smoke at the back of her throat.

He leaned down and grabbed the bag, throwing it over his shoulder. “When I say,
go,
you’re going to turn the handle and open the big garage door. Then run and hop on behind me.”

She knew it was a gamble. The second she opened the door, a mass of Eaters would pour in. Even if she made it to the motorcycle before they grabbed her, it would be much harder to break through them, because they wouldn’t have the momentum and speed that they’d had on the way up the mountain. The chances of getting pulled off the bike were very high.

Aidan put his gun in the bag and zipped it up.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going to fly out of here like bats out of hell. I need both of my hands.”

The smoke from the burning building, combined with the exhaust from the motorcycle made her eyes water, blurring her vision. She coughed as she waited for him to give her the signal.

He revved the throttle. “Okay, let’s go!”

It’s you or them, Cheryl. Don’t let them win.

It was her guardian angel. She took a deep breath and felt a new flood of adrenaline zip through her body. Keeping a firm grip on her gun, she twisted the garage door handle and hoisted up the door with one hand. As she flew the few feet back to the bike, she knew they were up against insane odds. She hopped on behind Aidan and got a better view of what she’d just had a glimpse of as she’d opened the door.

There were over twenty of them milling about. Some were engulfed in flames, shuffling around and moaning as their tattered skin crackled and burned. At once, like they’d been choreographed, they all turned towards the open garage. Leaning around Aidan, she opened fire, spraying into the crowd, knocking a few down. Aidan dumped the clutch, and they burned out. The back tire screeched on the concrete, whipping up exhaust and smoke as they shot out of the garage straight into the group.

In one lightning fast nightmare, foul mouths opened and hands grabbed for them as they came crashing through. None of the Eaters moved to avoid them, and there was no time to shoot as they smacked against limbs, hitting one bloated mannequin in the driveway. He fell under the tires, and they rolled right over the top. The wheels slid out in the gravel, but Aidan quickly righted the bike.

A second later, they were on the open road, tearing into the cool night, two pale faced riders with hearts beating faster than the strokes of the engine.

Chapter Eighteen

There was no slowing down as they sailed around curves, passing the occasional form ambling about on the side of the road, or swerving around one standing smack in the middle. Every second that passed, she worried that they would run into a roadblock just as they had coming up the mountain. In the dark, there would be no time to see them before it was too late.