Gabriel stepped inside and couldn’t help but let out a whistle of appreciation. The front entrance was massive, with most of the ground floor being just one large, interconnected room. The house had a rustic aesthetic, with wood floors and ceilings and plenty of stone walls. Golden chandeliers hung here and there from the ceiling, providing all of the illumination. The first room, opening out to their right, was a living room. The floor was dotted here and there strategically with couches, most the size of Gabriel ’s bed back home. Or larger.“Well, well, what have we here?”From out of one of the side rooms stepped a big, heavy set man. He was older, probably in his sixties, with a bushy beard that hung down to his upper torso. The hair of his beard, and what little remained on his head, were mostly a faded gray, though here and there specks of red still shone through the mist. Gabriel ventured the guess that this man was the person named “Red” that Bob had referred to earlier.“Fo
“Right,” Red said, nodding his head thoughtfully. “There’s just one problem with your theory.”“What?” Gabriel looked confused. “There is?”Red pulled a gun from his pants and aimed it straight at Gabriel . “Only my people are making a run for it.” He motioned with the gun to a nearby open door. “Your people are being locked in that room. As extra distraction.”“You can’t! They’ll kill us!”“That’s the idea,” Red said. “Now move!”Slowly he backed them up into the room, and once they were all inside he slammed the door shut. A moment later they heard the key click the lock into place, and a moment after that they heard the sound of the front door as it opened and closed.“Way to go, Gabriel ,” said Aliyah. “Now we’re locked into a tiny room.”“Yeah, yeah,” said Gabriel , distracted. He looked around the room. As he had hoped, it was a dining room. He stepped over to a cabinet displaying the fine china. “Let’s just work on getting our hands free.”“Oh, what’s the point?” whined Daina.
Mac, who had come into the lead, suddenly came to a stop, and several of the others were so distracted by the nightmare landscape that they ran into him and nearly knocked him over. After some shuffling, muttering, and grumbling, they all turned to see what had caused the delay.Up ahead of them, the driveway had come into view, and in the driveway sat the car that stood as their destination. Atop the car, highlighted dramatically by the full moon as though it were a spotlight on a stage, was a nightmare come to life: a fully formed, hairy, drooling aberration.A werewolf.It stood up straight, pulled back its head, and let out a howl.“Hole. Ly. Diver,” said Jay, his disbelief ef winning in the internal battle raging inside of him between the hope that voicing his surprise would dismiss the impossible and the fear that told him to keep silent to remain undetected.The werewolf snapped to attention in the direction of Jay’s voice. A low growl rumbled from inside of it as it knelt down
The werewolves both jumped and soared easily over the gate, but skidded as they landed and tried to get pointed back at the turning vehicle. Aliyah slammed on the gas and shot past them while they were still righting themselves.Mac let out a long and shrill “Woohoo!” as though the entire thing had been some sort of new exciting roller coaster. They shot down the road at top speed and slowly, ever so slowly, the wolves fell into the darkness behind them.The vehicle roared down the highway, pushing eighty, rocking this way and that as Aliyah attempted to dodge abandoned cars, loose debris, and even the occasional wandering zombie. Every movement was made with at best inches to spare, and occasionally there would be a terrible scraping sound or a sickening thump on those occasions when she didn’t quite manage to completely dodge the object in question. The single working headlight in the pitch black dark of an empty night made the navigation exceptionally difficult.“We can’t keep this
Then they were on them – biting, tearing, scratching, growling. For a long moment, everything was a blur of motion. One of the creatures came straight for Gabriel , and practically tackled him to the ground. They rolled around on the floor, with Gabriel focusing more on just pushing the creature away than trying to take it out completely. Around him he could tell the others were in much the same position.Jake, the only one with a weapon, had not been among the first attacked. She had swung at one of the creatures as it had passed, but it had not been a fatal blow, so it had carried on and slammed into Daina. Now the two women were trying to hold it off and get it into a position where Jake could deliver a killing swing.Gabriel managed to kick his assailant off, and as he tried to rise he felt hands grabbing at him. He tried to fight them off, but a reassuring voice calmed him.“Woah, woah, it’s just me.”Gabriel looked to see that Gabriel was standing above him, attempting to hel
Gabriel grimaced and took another look around the room. Suddenly, his face lit up with excitement. He pointed above his head and exclaimed, “The ceiling!”Everyone exchanged confused glances.“What about the ceiling?” asked Aliyah. “Do you want us to hide in it?”Gabriel sighed in frustration. Without another word he grabbed one of the desks and carried it over to the nearby wall. Pushing himself up on it, he explained, “I used to be in I.T., remember? At a school. We had drop ceilings exactly like this.”He pushed open one of the ceiling panels and raised his head up to get a look around. Frowning, he dropped down from the desk and then carried it to the wall on the opposite end of the room. Everyone followed behind him.As he climbed up and pushed open the ceiling from this new position, he continued explaining. “We did a lot of wiring from room to room, and in order to do that with these concrete walls, there were usually crawlspaces… Yes!”He looked back down from the open ceili
The plan had worked perfectly, and certainly enough the door to the office area was closed and most of the zombies had been trapped inside, unaware that Gabriel was no longer in there with them. A few stragglers were roaming about, having lost the scent of their prey a little earlier than the others, but Jake and the rest of the group were making quick work of these. By the time Mac and Gabriel dropped out of the ceiling, the others were finishing off the last of these stragglers.Their work done, Aliyah turned to Gabriel and gave him an annoyed look. “Señor Buffett?” she said, her tone dripping with irritation. “Really?”“What?” Gabriel asked, innocently. “It was all I could think of in the spur of the moment.”“Yeah,” Daina chimed in, stepping away from a zombie her and Jay had just taken out. “There’s a part of my old life I thought I’d never hear again.”“Well then, you’re welcome,” said Gabriel , a bit snippily.“Let’s just get out of here,” suggested Gabriel. “I have most ce
“When things go wrong, it is always easy to blame God. But when things go right, we always praise our own industriousness. But don’t you see it’s the same? God gave us free will. There cannot be strings attached. If he interferes at all, then that limits our free will. Like the old saying about teaching a man to fish, God gave us the tools to help ourselves. But while tools can be used to build, they can also be used to destroy. Just the same, man has the ability to do good, but he also has the same ability to do great evil. And you know as well as I do that this, as you say, the nightmare world in which we live, it was not created by God but by man.”“And so your god sees that as being fair? For the entire world to be punished for the sins of the few?”“We were all cast out of Eden for the sins of but a single person. You look at this, and all you see is the evil that has been created. But can you not also see the good that has been done? The people, complete strangers, coming togeth
At the end of the line Gabriel found another big building, which he knew the moment he stepped inside had to be a barracks. It was like a much larger version of the living quarters at the compound they had found in Texas. Just four long lines of beds stretching across the length of the room, with no care shown for privacy or individuality. All part of the process of breaking the spirit.“Newbie.”Gabriel turned toward the sound of the voice, to see someone, a prisoner, not a guard, judging from his clothes, staring at him. The stranger pointed toward the far wall and said, “You’ll want to see the manager. Hurry up.”Following with his eyes to where the man was pointing, Gabriel could see a window set into the wall, and realized there was probably some kind of office over there. He nodded a quick thanks to the man, only to discover he had already walked away, and then headed down the lines of beds toward the office.The door to the small room was open, and inside he found a woman se
“Uh… no,” replied Gabriel , noting strong hints of what seemed like a British accent in the creatures voice. “It’s an old term for a creature that slowly spreads through a village like a plague.”“Ah, such as the Vourdalak.”Gabriel blinked in surprise at this comment, stunned into silence.“Yes, well,” the creature continued, “it has long been the modus operandi of your kind to blame others for your own wrong doings. Judging from the state of things, I would say you plagued yourselves plenty well enough on your own without any help from me or mine. No doubt you still think yourself clever for the snide comment, however.”Gabriel had felt clever for the remark, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to admit that now.The vampire placed his cane on the ground and leaned on it with both hands, bending down to stare at Gabriel from a smaller distance.“Where are your others?” he asked.Gabriel ’s eyes widened, but he just shook his head. “What others?”“Don’t lie to me. We returned to the
“Turn out all your pockets, then,” said the big man. Gabriel did as he was told, or at least as well as he could seeing as most of the pockets in his cargo pants weren’t really designed for being turned out.When the others were satisfied he wasn’t carrying anything, the man tipped his head up to indicate Gabriel should move through the turnstile.Once through, the first figure motioned for him to stand on a line taped to the floor. She was holding one of the devices from the table in her right hand, a weird thing that looked a little like an electric razor only with a sharp point at the end instead of round blades. Once he was in place she said, “Roll up your sleeve and place your left arm on the table.”“What?” he asked stupidly. “Left sleeve. Arm. Table,” she answered, pointing at each thing in turn as she said it.Gabriel stared at the device in her hands but otherwise did not move. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked.Hands grabbed him from behind, pulling at his
“Hey, what’s the big idea?” Gabriel asked, annoyed. He blinked rapidly, clearing away more of the blurriness, until he could see that this wasn’t Joe and the others. He was surrounded by zombies. Gabriel let out a yelp and fell backwards, only to be shoved again from that side. This time the shove balanced him onto his feet, and he turned around to find that there were more zombies back in that direction, cutting off his path to the inside of the hospital. He turned toward the parking lot, only to see zombies had moved into position there, as well. He continued circling and found that he was surrounded on all sides by the undead. They had trapped him in, with nowhere to run. He felt like crying. He felt like panicking. But neither would help him then. So he closed his eyes, tucked his chin into his shoulder, and waited for the end. But nothing happened. Gabriel could hear some shuffling of feet, some of the eerie, inhuman moans that seemed to be an involuntary sound that the
Gabriel was fairly confident he couldn’t be seen from his position, since the doctor hadn’t noticed him yet. But undoubtedly the doctor was finally taking note of the rearranged equipment in the room. The beds moved out of place, the random cart just visible over the top of the halfway wall. At first glance it all might have looked normal enough, but the closer scrutiny he gave it as he stood there talking was enough to finally make him realize the difference. Bennet stopped talking and began walking, straight down the hallway toward the room. He moved cautiously, as though expecting at any moment to step on a landmine, but he continued on regardless. He reached the door, opening it with the same level of caution, peering around one last time before finally stepping into the room. After a moment he stumbled, one leg catching on a strip of cloth that tore away. A shelf of equipment came crashing down, slamming the door shut and barring across it as various items smashed against the
Horror movies told him that he should be looking at somebody horribly deformed, or wearing the skin of another person, or with a head full of small, scary spikes. Something. This guy could have been his doctor in the days before and Gabriel would’ve thought nothing of it. This man could’ve walked up to the gates of Joe’s little bunker community and they would’ve let him in and never thought twice about it. It was terrifying to contemplate. “Hello?” the man called, and just the sound of that simple word, muted and muffled as it was coming through the wall, turned Gabriel ’s blood to ice.The stranger started to turn away from the room, but then something made him stop and turn back.“Are you there?” the man continued calling out as he surveyed the room through the window with what looked like, at least in Gabriel ’s opinion, a sadistic grin. “That wasn’t what it looked like. I was trying to help that man.”Yeah, real convincing, thought Gabriel , but he remained silent as he crawled
He considered his options, favoring the one that said he could just wait there for the others to show up. But he didn’t know how long that would be and there was some good he could do inside the building while there.So taking a deep, steadying breath he pushed his way through the nearest doorway and headed deeper into the hospital.The hallways were dark, which was expected, but that expectation didn’t stop them from being especially eerie. Somehow, here and there, some emergency lights still clung desperately to life, flickering on and off at random times, throwing long, twisted shadows where they could span across the walls and floors, and leap out from around corners. The daylight provided sufficient illumination to counteract the lack of interior lighting, but as all the windows on the ground floor seemed to be either heavily tinted or located where the light bounced first off of walls before entering the rooms, the bluish glow it created only added to the ominous mood of the hos
“Gabriel !”Sturdy hands wrapped around his upper arms and shook him. He turned his head and his clearing vision made out the image of Joe standing in front of him. “Gabriel , get it together. We have to go. Now!”Gabriel nodded his head and tried to take a deep breath, and then found himself taking several quick gasping breaths. Was he panicking? He didn’t have time to panic.With as much certainty as he could manage he nodded his head. “Right,” he agreed, “let’s go.”They each turned and ran off in separate directions.This had all been worked out in advance, each person memorizing a map of the town, studying it, learning each street and alleyway. They’d all settled on a divided running path before they ever stepped foot outside of the base. So Gabriel knew where to go.Or he thought he did.Though he hadn’t been willing to admit it with the others, he had never been particularly good with maps, not great at visualizing the 2D images with 3D spaces. So it wasn’t that surprising w
“I’m telling you, you go to that place, the only thing you have to look forward to is death. You’re better off here. Just keep your heads down, hide out, and maybe they’ll never come for you. That’s the best thing to hope for.”There was a long silence marked only by the sound of some uncomfortable shuffling. Claire stepped forward so she could get a better look at him. “But… Gabriel … you went into the caves. You tried to make a difference.”“I was wrong, okay?”Gabriel shouted the words so loud that Claire took a step back.“I was wrong. I was an idiot and I was wrong and people suffered because I was wrong. I suffered because I was wrong. The world is worse off now than it was before, all because I had to go play hero. Well there are no heroes. There’s only the living and the dead and you’re either one or the other. You can stay here and stay alive or you can go out there and join the ranks of the dead. Those are your options. I don’t care which you choose, but if you choose deat