Protect All Monsters (29 page)

You thought I’d be an easy victim.

I don’t die so easy!

An artery shot through his wrist, the thick line poking the wolf underneath the neck and draining him instantly of four gallons of blood. The warmth, the power, the nourishment pouring into Brenner's body lent him confidence as it did strength.

“
Shraaaaaaaack!
”

The wolf gripped the cord, unable to snap it or break the flow of stolen blood. It fumbled to save its life, and after a minute, it tipped sideways in defeat.

He watched the top of the stairs for any more monsters to come his way. The profiles of long lines of them, hundreds upon hundreds, filed from every passage and chamber in unison.

Brenner was startled when the wolf’s body shifted. Through its back, the skin stretched, bubbled up, the sheath turning thinner and thinner as hair was shed to reveal a bald section. Tighter and tighter the flesh became until it popped, splitting down the middle in ribbons. Tearing from within, hands grappled through barriers of muscle tissue. Then a body formed. Then a blood-slick vampire burst from the wolf’s dead shell. Before Brenner could deduce what had transpired, the vampire was charging at him. He dove for his twelve-gauge, and spinning on the ground, he aimed without a chance to fully know his accuracy. He pulled back a shot, blasting the vampire in the chest. Its feet left the ground, and it emitted a high-pitched squeal. The line of green lighting up both eyes was snuffed out in seconds.

You’re going to have to do better than this to kill me.

“
Raaaaaaaaah!
”

The bleeding vampire shed its skin—or Brenner thought it was shedding its skin. The skin went through a speedy cycle of rotting, regressing into blackened and fungus-infested flesh. The spilling blood turned to gel. Its arteries had hardened. The bones became brittle, but the body was alive, roaring and once again working to its feet to attack him.

Brenner was face-to-face with a level-two zombie.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!”

He didn’t want to suck the blood from the decaying man, so he utilized the twelve-gauge to plug another bullet into its head. The head was so rotted and weak the bullet clipped half its head off.

Brenner was puzzled by his attacker and what forms it’d taken. He waited for it to rise up again, to retrograde into another villain, but the head kept oozing black, putrid blood and creepy crawlies, the contents of a can of cranberry sauce infested by vermin. Deciding not to take any risks, he stamped the body as if putting out a camp fire. He wasn’t satisfied until the mess was unrecognizable. Caramel and green slime filtered through the broken orifices.

His attacker had changed from wolf to vampire to zombie in less than a five-minute period.
This dead creature is only the beginning. What other tricks are up their sleeves?

The monsters above him had to have heard the twelve-gauge blasts. Nobody had come to investigate. They were too caught up in reaching the first floor, and maybe a few gunshots meant nothing to them, he believed.

Something else was in the room with him. He swept the chamber with his eyes. Modified boats. Concrete walls. Barren stairs. The section of water was still.

“Where are you, huh? Face me!”

His body was ready to suck the blood of his adversary. The lamprey suckers poked their heads out of his arms and shoulders. Their circular mouths gaped wide, begging to be satiated.

A trail of varnish-colored muck, the same he’d seen in a section of the corridor previously, trailed up the stairs, workings its way up higher and higher. That’s when the door suddenly slammed shut. He was left in darkness.

The slop and glom of moving slime resounded louder, as if the consistency were growing thicker and increasing still. “What are you? Are you too scared to fight me in the light? Huh, is that it? I’ll kill you anyway.
Every one of you
!”

The room wasn’t cold anymore, but humid and warm. He sweated in the rising heat. Something was stealing the air in the room. He raced for the stairs. In the dark, each step was a daring hypothesis. The retreat did no good when from above he was pelted and enshrouded in a mucous fluid. Liquid fingers seized his ankles and legs. The ice-cold fingertips crawled up his legs. He was frozen in place. His lamprey arteries were trapped beneath the flesh, beneath the layer of heavy fluids covering him. His head down to his chest was layered in the goop. The layers continued to take hold, firming up, becoming solid like putty. He couldn’t speak or cry out, his lips being sealed shut.

And that’s when the liquid changed. It was instantaneous. Warm flesh, beating hearts, circulatory systems delivering vital fluids, then mouths, widening eyes, gripping hands, arching feet and clawing arms were born. Each body separated from the mass and became an individual. The rank odor of the dead, the brittle and coarse hair of the werewolves and the smooth skin of the vampires—the room was dominated by the abominations.

He was attacked from every direction. His back was slashed by talons. Neck sucked and supped by hungry mouths. Clacking teeth claimed three digits from his left hand. His feet were kicked out from underneath him. His left eye was stubbed out by a tongue and scooped out by a dagger-nailed finger. His rib cage was crushed by a wolf’s embrace. More wolves peeled the flesh off his pectorals. That’s when they uncovered his monstrous circulatory system, and the lampreys were exposed under the skin.

“
Fight these, you bastards
!”

Brenner’s eye adjusted to the dark. Many of the lampreys leaped from his body and snaked into eyes, mouths, ears, or crawled beneath the flesh of their bodies. New blood circulated throughout him, but he was too wounded to receive it. The surplus of red squirted and sprayed from his body in spastic cycles.

He couldn’t fight them, nor could he use their blood to rejuvenate him. His neck was dribbling blood, his femoral artery and jugular vein gushing endlessly. His left arm from the elbow down was a chewed-up stump. The flesh on his back was peeled. Half his scalp was shredded by dull, hollow zombie teeth. His legs were minced and gnawed to the bone. Brenner couldn’t move. He was stuck in place by his fighting circulatory system that worked only on instinct.

Brenner regretted the decision he had to make, but he acted on the impulse anyway. He crawled, soon reaching the edge of the water. He dropped himself in. The cold depths stung his wounds. He cried out, his mouth filling with salty water. He clung to the edge of the foundation wall and waited for the monsters to come in after him.

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.”