The Resurrected Compendium (24 page)

Doug cleared his throat. “Steve? You okay, man?”

“He’s not okay.” Kathleen pulled away from him. Took two steps forward. Not within Steve’s range, not unless he started moving much faster. She remembered the things on the beach, and thought he just might.
 

 
Steve straightened. If Molly had stabbed him, there wasn’t any sign of it now. He coughed and spat a wad of something dark onto the white kitchen tiles.

“Steve!” Doug limped forward, putting himself between Kathleen and his friend. “C’mon, man. Stop. What’s the matter with you?”

Steve took a staggering step closer to them, one hand reaching. His face worked and crumpled. The horrible grinding noise had gone quiet, at least there was that, but none of this was any better.
 

The front door rocked on its hinges, the knob rattling, the chain that was supposed to keep out thieves no match against whatever was out there now. Molly screamed and dropped the knife. Steve’s head lolled.
 

He started to laugh.

It was a sick, hitching sound, no humor in it. Like a hyena.
 
Kathleen wanted to put her hands over her ears. She wanted to curl up under some blankets and make all of this go away.

Instead, she moved. Past Doug and Steve, away from the door against which something was still hammering so hard the wood had actually started to crack. “Molly, come on!”

The apartment was a long rectangle, living and dining room in the front with a small kitchen to the side. Hallway with one bath and two guest bedrooms, the master bedroom and bath at the back with the balcony overlooking the ocean accessible from both sliding glass doors in the master bedroom and a small door at the end of the hall. That’s where Kathleen went now, into the bedroom, where she yanked open the sliders to go out onto the balcony.

No fire escape, nothing like that, but there was some weird architectural design to the concrete walls that made ledges between one balcony and the next. From the living room came the crash of glass. The window? Something else? She didn’t have time to think about it. She could barely think of anything.

Molly had gone out onto the balcony. “Look at this!”

Kathleen followed. The highway had become a clogged snarl of traffic, police cars everywhere. A few firetrucks. An ambulance.

And people.

Oh, the people. Staggering, limping, some of them crawling. Some cops were handcuffing them. Some EMTs were loading others onto gurneys. It had become madness, and they needed to get out there, because if they stayed in here —

Doug, holding up Steve, made it through the bedroom door and slammed it behind them. “They got in. The ones from the beach. They’re moving slow, but they’re coming.”

“What are those things?” Molly cried.

Kathleen started stripping the bed. The comforter with the lighthouse went onto the floor, but the white sheets beneath she tied together, corner to corner, tugging the knots as tight as she could with numb fingers. “I don’t know. But I have to get out of here. I have to get home. Molly, do you have your keys?”

Molly went to the dresser and rummaged in her purse. “Yes.”

Kathleen paused, looking at the two men who’d seemed like nothing but a harmless bit of fun.
 
Steve sat on the edge of the bed, still laughing though the sound had gone low and breathless like the hiss of air escaping a punctured tire. Doug leaned against the dresser, head down. He looked the way she felt. Exhausted.

“I need to get home,” she repeated. “We need to get out of here.”

Something crashed in the hallway.
 
Steve twitched and jerked. Doug looked up.

“The balcony?” He said, like it made perfect sense.

Molly muttered a curse. Kathleen nodded. She gathered the sheets, praying her knots would hold, and tied one end to the metal railing.

“We don’t have to climb down the sheets. Just hold onto them while you put your feet on those things.” She pointed to the ledges. “Then onto the next balcony. We’ll go out through that apartment.”

“What if there’s someone in there too?” Molly asked.

Nothing pounded on the bedroom door, but it did scrape softly.

Suddenly, everything seemed worth the risk.

 
Steve went first. Katy was sure he’d fall and break on the ground below, but somehow he got onto the lower balcony. Doug next, though he protested and only went when she told him he wasting too much fucking time and should move his ass. Molly after that, and then finally Kathleen, whose feet had just touched the concrete ledge when the door from the hall flew open and something came through it.
 

She wasted no time seeing if it was the man with stumps for feet or the woman in the bikini. Kathleen dropped, holding onto the sheet, praying she wouldn’t let go or miss the balcony. Hands grabbed and pulled her over the railing, and she fell onto the concrete floor ready to kiss it. Above her, that grinding noise began again.

Molly’d already broken the sliding glass doors with a chair. Scattered glass shone on the floor. Doug had a hand on Steve’s shoulder, talking to him in a low voice with words Kathleen couldn’t make out. She got to her feet, sick to her stomach from how fast her heart was pounding, but ready to move.

Doug recoiled. Molly let out a low cry that got louder, but Kathleen couldn’t see what had happened. She had a hand on the railing to keep herself upright, and that’s when Steve turned toward her, mouth yawning wide and wider, a vast and open space gone black inside, no sign of teeth or even tongue.

There was no sound. Just the sensation of a fine, hot mist hitting her face and a stench like dirty bandaids, thick enough to choke her. Kathleen clapped a hand over her mouth, and pain flaring again from her nose doubled her vision. She staggered back and hit the railing. She went to her knees.

Everything went dark.

* * *

Somehow, she was standing on her front porch.
 

No Molly, no car in the driveway, nothing but the soft hushing whisper of the breeze across grass that had grown too long for what should’ve been only a few days. A bird called. From farther away, a dog barked and yipped, and Kathleen realized that she’d been hearing that dog barking for a very long time.
 

She touched her front door. Metal against her palm, hot enough to burn, and she pulled it away. Her fingernails were broken, black with dirt. The pads of her fingers raw.
 

Her hair, when she put a hand to it, was tangled and filthy. She wore a pair of jeans and a t-shirt she didn’t recognize. Her feet were bare.

She couldn’t remember leaving Ocean City, or how she’d gotten home, or anything after Steve had…what had he done? What had happened? She touched her face with trembling fingers, mapping the lines and curves that should’ve been so familiar and finding only the face of a stranger.

Kathleen put her hand on the doorknob. She opened the door. She went inside.

She’d gone home.

SIX

28

Kelsey had been walking for a long time.

Her feet had blistered, torn open, scabbed but didn’t heal. She’d started the journey in a pair of ill-fitting flip-flops that had rubbed the skin raw between her toes. Then in a pair of donated, heavy, lace-up shoes. Now she wore a pair of soft white athletic socks from a store that had been looted clean of most everything else, but the hiking boots she’d found had been a size too big and now her heels were mangled too. The cut on her sole, the one she got on the boat, oozed pus, infected though she’d done her best to clean it. She wrapped her feet in the socks and bound them with bandages. She switched to duct tape when she ran out of gauze and discovered the tape’s slick surface protected her feet better, though she had to cut it off with a pair of nail scissors when she wanted to change it. It was easier to leave on for a few days at a time, even though the dull, hot throb going all the way up to her calf told her she wouldn’t like what she saw when she took off the tape.

The world had turned to shit in the past week. Or had it been two? It could’ve been three for all she knew, or frankly cared. Time had lost meaning, become a blur, while she walked.
 

She didn’t really know where she was going. She didn’t really have any place to go. All she knew was that she had to go somewhere, because the place she’d been had become a nightmare.

 
After picking her up from the sailboat, her rescuers had taken her to a shelter someplace in North Carolina, where she’d been given a pallet in a school gymnasium. She’d asked to be allowed to return to the hotel to get her things, but the people in charge had put her off with a “later” or a “tomorrow” or, more frighteningly, without an answer at all. And what did she have to get, anyway? She’d lost everything of importance over the side of that boat. Phone, wallet, I.D. Clothes. Boyfriend. Would-be lover.

The gym had no televisions, but enough people sheltering there had smart phones and therefore, maintained a connection to the world outside the concrete walls and beyond the armed soldiers guarding them. Rumors flew about the purpose of the soldiers’ guns — to protect the refugees from whatever it was going on outside? Or to protect the world from the ragtag collection of displaced tourists who’d been yanked away from their vacations and herded into this stinking, echoing chamber with inadequate bathroom facilities and food so disgusting it was no trouble to pass up?

Kelsey had seen what happened on that sailboat. Nothing in anyone’s newsfeed could compare to the reality. People talked in hushed but hysterical voices about rioting, brownouts, a State of Emergency. Nobody said a word about flowers that bloomed and died within minutes, or boyfriends whose faces exploded. Nobody said anything about corpses that came back to life,
 

Only two days into her stay, Kelsey knew she had to get out. She recognized a prison when she was in one, no matter how it was disguised. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever used her cleavage to distract a man into thinking he was giving her something of his own accord when he was actually being manipulated. Those other seductions had been about getting a meal, a place to sleep, some cash. Something pretending, even for a short time, to be love. They’d always been about survival, but this time was in actuality about life or death, even if the other refugees didn’t seem to know that. Neither did the the soldier, who fucked her up against a wall and cried out someone else’s name when he climaxed. Three minutes of breathless heaving, that was all it took for him to avert his eyes when Kelsey snuck out a back door and across the parking lot.

Out here, the story was only a little more clear. News vans heavy with equipment circled up like wagons around a campfire, their inhabitants running on coffee and doughnuts. Kelsey spotted a well-known national reporter who usually covered red carpet events and dissed skinny actresses’ fashion sense—today her coif was limp, her outfit worthy of the most scathing mockery. She shouted at the cameraman from a distance, pointing at the brick building against which Kelsey had only moments before been engaged in sexual congress with a soldier. Kelsey didn’t know what the woman was shouting about, but didn’t waste her time trying to find out.

She did, however, stop next to one of the vans to sneak a look at what they were broadcasting. Storms. There’d been storms.

Kelsey didn’t wait to see more than that.
 

At twelve, she’d dreamed of escaping. Running away, with maybe some clothes hung over her back in a bandanna tied to a stick. She’d never done it. She’d taken matters into her hands in another way, more beneficial, in the end. She hadn’t needed to hit the road, but now she remembered the plans she’d made. The maps she’d studied, tracing roads and rivers with her fingertips, thinking of all the places she would go. Just like in that book by Dr. Seuss.
 

She’d gone a lot of those places, too. Found a way to get there, by hook or by crook. But even in her darkest days, Kelsey had never imagined herself sneaking along a highway underpass or slogging through a drainage ditch or climbing a chain-link fence in order to get away from the double threat of the military and the media.

She saw the evidence of the storms in fallen trees and mucked up fields. She scanned the earth for those flowers, those goddamned flowers, but if they’d taken root and bloomed anyplace, they’d already died. When a convoy of military trucks and assorted police and emergency vehicles passed her by, the cop cars alight with red and blue but the ambulances ominously silent, Kelsey decided it was time to avoid the highways.

She took back roads after that. She snuck into a back yard and lifted some clothes from a line. They didn’t fit, but were better than the shapeless jumpsuit they’d given her in the shelter. She felt worse about this theft than about using her body to tease a man into abandoning his duty, until she peeked into the windows of the house and saw its residents sitting in front of a television neither could possibly see, as neither of them had intact faces.

She walked without direction or purpose, wondering when it would be her turn to stagger and choke. When her eyes and nose and mouth would stream with black goo. When she would go crazy and try to tear the world apart in her bare fists. Every morning, Kelsey woke and ate or drank from whatever she’d managed to scrounge and store in the backpack she’d stolen along with the socks and hiking boots. She did fifteen minutes or half an hour of yoga or Tai Chi to warm her muscles and center herself. She studied the sky and tested the air with a wet finger to see which way the wind blew, and then she set off with it at her back because that seemed to be the easiest way to decide where she should travel.

The world had become a nightmare, but it didn’t all fall apart right away. Not entirely. The storms had come and decimated rural areas, but people didn’t stay in one place. They moved. They travelled, some to get away from the destruction or their suddenly insane neighbors setting things on fire, some with some strange urge eating away at them from the inside, a tickle in their minds like a tickle in the throat.