Gnash (25 page)

“Shit, what are we gonna do now?” Curtis asked again.

“We’re gonna have to restrain her then.  Anyone have any rope?”

Another of the residents said that he did and ran down the street to his house.  While he was gone, the group stood in silence and watched Jessica’s bloody hands waving frantically through the cutout.  Abruptly they stopped and Jessica’s head jerked around towards the back of the house and she cocked her head to the side like she was listening.

“Hey! Hey! What’s she doing?” Gretchen asked, pointing towards the door.

“Fuck, she’s focusing on something inside the house.  I left my rifle in there when we were fighting earlier.  Maybe she’s going after that,” Grayson said.

Before anyone could move, Jessica turned and ran down the hallway towards the back of the house.  There were sounds of shouting and of large items breaking coming from inside.  A gun went off and suddenly someone started screaming.  Jamie covered her ears with both of her hands and sank to the walkway on her knees.

The scream intensified to a higher level of panic and reached the crescendo.  Then, it stopped just as abruptly as it had begun.  Grayson grabbed a baseball bat from someone in the crowd and ran to the door.  He pressed the thumb lever down on the handle and pushed the door open. 
Shit, shit, shit!  What am I doing?
he thought over and over to himself as he crept down the hall.

He stepped out of the hallway into a scene of utter chaos.  Blood was splattered randomly across the walls, the furniture and the curtains.  The thing that used to be Jessica was crouched down tearing pieces of meat and fat from a twitching form almost casually.  Garbled sounds that could have been either groans of pain or air escaping from dead lungs bubbled from the lips of the person she’d just attacked.

Grayson had seen a lot of death and dismemberment from IEDs and enemy fighters during his tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they were nothing compared to this.  Everything he’d seen had been as a result of some type of mechanical object, either a bullet, a bomb, even vehicle accidents.  This was different, there was a raw and primal evil that emanated from this person, this
creature,
he corrected himself.  She’d done this with her bare hands.

He wretched involuntarily as he thought of the pure wrongness of what he was witnessing.  Instantly, Jessica turned towards him and snarled.  She stood and crouched low as if she was ready to pounce on him from across the room, which, in all likelihood, she was.  He retreated a few steps into the hallway in an effort to protect his flanks.  As soon as he did, she advanced towards him and he realized his mistake.  He was able to thrust the bat forward to push her away from him, but he wasn’t able to swing it to do any real damage due to the closeness of the hallway.

He risked a quick glance over his shoulder towards the open front door.  Beyond, he could see the small group of his new friends milling about on the driveway, unsure of what to do.  He knew that he had to stop her inside the house or else she’d kill all of them the way she’d killed the unknown intruder in the house.  He turned his head back around in time to see Jessica in mid-leap and he threw the baseball bat up in a block that caught her across the wrist.  Her hand snapped backwards with a sickening snap and flopped along the top of her forearm.

Unfazed, she swung her injured arm low in an effort to get below his block.  He ducked to get the bat lower and realized that he’d made another mistake.  With blazing speed, she’d almost simultaneously swung one arm low and reached forward with her other hand to grasp him.  She almost connected with her top hand, but years of martial arts had conditioned him enough to move his head back out of the way.

He tried to push her backwards with the end of the bat but she grasped it and jerked him violently towards her.  He instinctively threw up his arm with the cast again as her teeth sank into the material.  He’d been in more fights than he could ever remember, both in the dojo and on the streets and he knew this was a battle that he wouldn’t win. 

Even as she ground her teeth closer and closer to his skin under the cast, she tried to grab him with her good hand.  Repeatedly, she connected with the stub of her broken hand but the fingers no longer responded to her commands to close.  He pushed with all his strength, but he could feel himself weakening.  She pushed even harder against him and his shoes scrambled for a grip on the tile floor. 

Suddenly, he was pulled towards her and then her teeth were ripped off of him as the wire loop from an animal control catch tool was slipped over her head and tightened.  She thrashed wildly against the metal cable that was tightened around the upper part of her face.  Her arms flailed against the pole and it began to bend.  Grayson could tell that Justin, the man holding the dog snatching pole, had already gotten more than he bargained for a mere five seconds before. 

Justin struggled to hold Jessica at bay and he almost lost his grip on the pole.  Grayson crept up behind her and swung the bat with everything he had.  He connected solidly with the back of her head and felt the bat sink a few inches into her skull.  She dropped to the ground, but just as quickly began to struggle up again.   He took one more baseball swing to knock her down and she started upwards again.  He didn’t have any choice left but to bash her brains out with overhand strikes.

Dimly, he heard Justin yelling at him.  All he saw was red.  His world was tunneled into destroying this evil bitch that had almost killed him, Jamie and Justin.  Finally, a bone-jarring vibration halted his attack and he realized that he’d beaten completely through her head and was now only hitting the floor.  Fatigue overwhelmed him and he staggered to the couch.  He sat down heavily on a cushion, dimly aware of the large chunk of meat resting beside him on the couch.

“What the fuck was that, man?” Justin asked as the snatch pole fell from his grip.

“I don’t know, but the way she acted was a lot like the guy that bit her a couple days ago…” Grayson trailed off as his mind began to process the implication that the sickness was communicable.

Justin reached for the discarded pole and slid the cable out from the mass of flesh and bone where Jessica’s head had been and asked, “Did you get bitten by her?”

Grayson patted himself down.  He felt like crap from his two battles with Jessica, but as far as he could tell, he hadn’t been bitten. 

Jamie stumbled into the room followed closely by the group.  She sobbed when she saw her sister’s body and ran to Grayson and threw her arms around him, crying into his shoulder.  A few of the others made faces at the mess, but mostly, they looked to Grayson and Justin for an explanation of what happened.

Justin relaxed a little, seeing the back-up arrive.  He gestured towards Grayson and said, “We need to check him, make sure he wasn’t bitten by her or something.  He said it’s the same way that crazy druggie acted the other day, the one that bit her.  Whatever he had spread to her and she went just as insane as he was.”

“I checked myself over, I don’t think I was bitten,” Grayson said as Jamie separated herself from him.  “She clamped down on my cast, but she never broke the skin.  I should be okay as long as the sickness isn’t airborne.”

Justin paled visibly and looked around the house.  Finally, he settled on the partially dismembered corpse and gestured weakly towards it.  “Well, that’s Alex.  Guess he was trying to be a hero or something.  He’s not gonna help me brew that beer after all,” he said in mild shock.  Justin and Alex had planned on making some home-brew for the citizens of Three Pillars once they scraped together the supplies.

“It’s ok, son.  Why don’t you go home, we’ll take care of things here,” Curtis told Justin, who nodded weakly and turned to walk past his friend’s body to the back door where he’d entered during the fight with Jessica.

Suddenly, Alex’s corpse lunged forward, grabbed Justin’s ankle and sunk its teeth into his thigh.  The group surged to action and quickly pulled the partially dismembered corpse off of Justin, then systematically beat it into a bloody pulp with whatever instrument that was in their reach.

Grayson, who had helped destroy the creature by kicking it with his boots, bent over and rested his hands on his knees.  He took a deep breath and said, “Ok Justin, let’s see about that leg.”

Justin screamed at them to leave him alone, ran through the door and scampered over the back yard fence.

“Well, shit.  What do we do now?” asked Curtis.

“I guess we have to go find him before he gets sick too,” Grayson sighed.

THIRTEEN

09 May, 2015 hrs local

Three Pillars Estates

Indianapolis, Indiana

By the end of the day, most of the residents of Three Pillars had turned out to search for Justin.  Curtis had sworn the small group who witnessed the attacks by Jessica and Alex to secrecy since they all agreed that it would start a wave of panic that could threaten the safety of everyone in the subdivision.  So they’d simply told everyone else that he was missing, but considered dangerous.

So far, no one had reported seeing him.  The community was similar in size to a small town, with a little over 500 houses, but almost all of the homes were occupied and the ones that weren’t were searched multiple times.  The only structures besides single-family homes that were in the neighborhood were two county-mandated condominium buildings with twelve condos per building, three small blocks of townhouses and the community activities clubhouse adjacent to the pool so it shouldn’t have been that hard to find him if he was still in the subdivision.

Grayson and Curtis were frustrated that they couldn’t find Justin.  They knew that in all likelihood, it was only a matter of time before he got sick and then began attacking residents, then they would just run towards the screams.  They were fighting against the clock, but with the electricity still out, they decided to call off the search until the next day.  Justin was potentially too dangerous, especially in the coming darkness, and even more so since only about ten people knew what had really happened with Jessica and Alex. 

Most of the residents who weren’t on guard at the gate or along the fence gathered on the neighborhood softball field at 8:15 p.m. like Curtis had instructed.  Those who didn’t would have to be informed by their neighbors.  After the search turned up nothing, the Three Pillars leadership decided the best thing to do would be to tell the residents about the fight at Jessica’s house and what they feared would happen to Justin.

Curtis climbed up onto a large plastic utility box cover that was molded to look like a rock in an effort to beautify the neighborhood.  Somebody had ripped it from its proper resting spot and carried it to the field so he could be seen by everyone.

He wasn’t one to mince words, so he started right in, “Hi everybody.”  He waited a few seconds while those closest to him greeted him.  “Alright, we’re in a pickle, that’s for sure…”

“Speak up!” someone shouted from the back of the crowd.

“Sorry friends, is this better?” he asked.  It sounded to Grayson like Curtis had almost instantly shed his civilian persona and stepped back into his days in the Navy as his voice boomed across the softball field.

“Like I was sayin’, we’re in some trouble here,” he stopped as voices from the crowd asked questions.  He held up his hands and said, “This is gonna go a lot easier and faster if y’all just let me talk.  Hear me out, save your questions ‘til the end and maybe we can get home before it gets fully dark.

“I’m sorry to inform you that both Jessica Spellman and Alex Brennan have died.”  He waited a moment as more people gasped and a few even cried out.  “Jessica was a member of the neighborhood watch.  A few days ago, we raided that house on Sycamore Street to clear out the drug dealers and gang members, Jessica was with us.

“When we got there, all of the pushers were already dead, except one.  He attacked us and we were forced to defend ourselves.  In the fight, Jessica was bitten by this man.  When we searched the house…Now please prepare yourselves…When we searched the house, we found the other drug dealers’ bodies.  It looked like this guy had been eatin’ his buddies.

“I’m sorry folks.  I don’t want to upset ya, but it does get worse.  We brought Jessica back here and she got really sick, no matter what we did.  So we were preparin’ to go to Pecan Valley because they have a doctor that lives there.  When we went to check on Jessica this morning, she turned into a crazy person, just like the man at the Sycamore house had been.  She attacked Grayson here and he fought her off.

“It was like she wasn’t even human.  She inflicted all sorts of damage to herself before we could even stop her, damage that would have incapacitated a normal person.  And she was powerful, so powerful that she bent a metal pole almost in half.  She killed Alex during the fight and she ripped him to pieces. We tried to knock her out, restrain her, lock her in the house, nothin’ worked,” Curtis took a deep breath and looked at Grayson.  “Finally, after we’d exhausted all other means of restrainin’ her, we had to make the decision to save our own lives.  The blame lies with me.”

He spoke louder to drown out the voices in the crowd, “While we were recoverin’ from the fight, Alex bit Justin.  There was no doubt that Alex was killed by Jessica.  I don’t know how, but his corpse got up and attacked Justin.  After we dealt with the threat from Alex, Justin ran out the back door and we haven’t been able to find him.

“We don’t know anything at all about the sickness other than the three people we know of that had it for sure were extremely violent and didn’t react to pain at all.  I think it spreads through bites or open wounds, but we can’t be sure.  We need to find Justin before he gets sick and attacks people, spreading this disease.  We can’t risk searchin’ for him in the dark.  If the power was on, it might be different, but I don’t believe we should be out in the dark.  Tomorrow morning we’ll start again, but I think it’s best if everyone goes home and locks up for the night.

“Alright, that’s all I’ve got.  Does anybody have any questions?” Curtis asked the now silent crowd.