Then Gabe moved.
Fran gasped, then stepped toward him. He was moving, crawling inch by painful inch toward her.
John saw her move and, still howling, sprang to his feet. He grabbed by the arms and ran her to the stairs, practically hurling her up the first three. She hit her knee hard on one of the steps, bruising it badly. She did not cry out, though, too frightened even to scream.
"Go or die!" whispered John in between his shouts of panicked agony, and then turned away without waiting for her reply.
Fran looked up the stairs. It was dark above and she was afraid. Afraid again. Like that night so many years ago. Nathan had died, and she had almost died as well. But she had survived, and more than anything had been comforted by the fact that such terror could never visit her again. But it had come again. The terror was back.
And once more, as she had the night Nathan was killed, Fran found herself running for her life.
***
John resumed his position, hunched behind the couch. He screamed a moment longer, then let the cries peter out into a sustained whimper. It would sound as though he was losing strength, he hoped, further adding to their attackers’ confidence. Besides, a whimper would be harder to pinpoint.
He crouched, ready to move in a nanosecond, splitting his attention between the front door, the kitchen door that opened nearby, and the hall entry through which he and Fran had entered.
The kitchen was where the woman came in, and John almost didn’t see it, because the second before the door swung open a noise distracted him, a rasping sound that John had heard before. The noise sent a chill through his body, and he almost convulsed with the force of his sudden terror. The noise that frightened him so was the same he had heard at the sheriff’s station. It was the noise he had heard when Tal began crawling toward him. It was the noise of a dead man moving.
Gabe. John could hear that his friend was crawling toward him, pulling his way over the hardwood floors, dead, clawlike fingers grasping for purchase like talons. The rasping noise distracted him, and for a moment he forgot his training, forgot everything but that noise. He was, for a moment, transported back to the day his father died. He heard that noise, then, as well. The noise of a dead man moving.
Then the kitchen door swung quietly inward, pushed open by the long barrel of a shotgun. The momentary glimpse into his past was forgotten as he hurled himself at the door, smashing it into the gun and his attacker’s fingers. He heard the woman cry as two of her fingers snapped between the door and the warm metal of the shotgun. The door swung open wider as John grabbed the barrel of the weapon. It was the blonde girl, still howling but holding onto the gun with a death grip.
John yanked the gun, pulling her into the room with him, and at that moment heard the door kick in behind him.
He was a Green Beret, had been very good at his job, and had little doubt that he could take the girl in a one-on-one confrontation. But this wasn’t a movie. One more person at his back would quickly finish him off.
***
Malachi leveled his shotgun at John, waiting for a cleaner shot. He didn’t give a damn if he hit Jenna or not, but he wanted to be sure to finish the man off in one shot. He wanted to be sure he blew John’s head off.
Malachi waited a fraction of a second longer...there!
He pulled the trigger.
But at that precise moment, he felt a hand - strong, painfully strong - grip his leg and then throw it out from under him.
The shot went wide, plowing into and through the wall about a foot from John’s head. Plaster and wood erupted from the target, raining splinters down on everyone nearby. A shard hit Malachi in the cheek, bloodying it slightly, but he had no time to notice the pain or wipe his face. Still being yanked about by the strong hand that had caused him to miss his shot, Malachi teetered for an instant. He saw John continue fighting with Jenna for the shotgun, then he lost his balance and fell on his back.
The man they’d shot – undoubtedly Gabriel, the man who had called the sheriff’s office - leered down at Malachi, his face three-quarters destroyed, a tangled mass of flesh held together by gristle and bone and partially-torn cartilage.
The monster’s undead hands encircled Malachi’s throat and began to twist and pull. Malachi felt the blood flow cut off and almost immediately grew woozy.
Then the beast stopped.
It pulled its hands away as though recognizing its master, for so it did. Malachi smiled at what remained of Gabriel Harding’s face.
Malachi could not be harmed by the monsters. Could not be killed by those undead. He was elect, and he was protected by divine right, locked into his genetic makeup.
His smile widened when Deirdre entered the room. She quickly sized up the situation and strode to where the creature still knelt over Malachi, its ruined mouth opened in a forever scream of sudden understanding as to what it truly was. Deirdre did not wait for Malachi’s orders. She put her shotgun against the creature’s temple and blew its head off.
***
John saw Malachi pulled down and felt the shot pass wide over his shoulder and slam into the wall. But he had no time to marvel at his good fortune or to cheer the evil man’s fall. The woman he faced demanded all his attention, fighting with venomous zeal and horrendous ferocity. What she apparently lacked in formal combat training she made up for in energy, and John had to put his all into the pressing task of staying alive.
The woman rocketed her knee into John’s crotch, trying to cripple him. John, experienced with such this type of situation, sensed the attack before it came and pitched his pelvis forward. The move shifted his anatomy slightly, moving his testes out of harm’s way so when her knee hit him it missed his genitalia. The attack bruised him, smashing painfully against his crotch and jarring his already tender tailbone, but wasn’t the crippling hit it would have been had she caught him square on.
He wilted, though, as though she had connected, then in the next moment straightened again, driving her shotgun into her chin. Her head snapped back, knocking into the wall behind her, and her fingers loosened on the gun.
John yanked the weapon away from her and planted the stock firmly in her gut. He heard the air whoosh out of her lungs as her diaphragm was crushed backward with the force of his blow. She fell, the wind knocked out of her and perhaps sporting a few broken ribs, and then John turned to the scene behind him.
Gabe - moving again, moving Tal, moving though clearly dead - lay across Malachi’s chest, staring into the madman’s eyes. For a moment it looked like Gabe – or the thing Gabe had become – was going to kill Malachi. Then he stopped moving, suddenly frozen in place and apparently unable to continue his attack.
Malachi smiled.
John didn’t know what was going on, but he wasn’t about to stay and find out. He turned to the inky stairwell and ran up, hoping to find Fran and a way to escape from this deathtrap. Before he could move, though, he felt the shotgun pulled from his grasp. The woman, crumpled below him, had pulled it loose. She aimed it at him, but he kicked the shotgun hard, knocking it from her grasp. She cried out as the gun flew out of her hand, and John hoped he had broken her fingers.
He snatched another rifle off the wall next to him, knowing that Gabe kept the weapons loaded in case of intrusion, and then hurried up the stairs without looking behind him.
Behind him, he heard a shot. The noise made him jump and look at himself, half expecting to see blood pouring from a massive exit wound in his chest or stomach.
Nothing. The shot either went wide or was meant for a different target. And he had to get to Fran. She stood at the top of the stairs, peering down at him from the darkness. If he’d been one of their attackers, she would be dead right now, he thought. But what did he expect? She had no special training, no preparation for this kind of action. When he thought of it, he was amazed at her ability to get through this as well as she had.
He pulled her away from the steps, moving down the dark hall to Gabe’s bedroom, passing several doors on either side.
"What happened?" asked Fran. She was trying to be tough, but John saw tears glisten behind her eyes. "What happened down there?"
John didn’t answer.
"Where’s Gabriel?"
Her voice was small, so pitiful that John went against his instincts and took the time to answer: "He’s dead.
Now Fran started crying. John shook her. Gently, he didn’t want to hurt her, but hard enough that she looked at him. He spoke quickly, intensely, still edging them toward the master bedroom.
"I'm sorry," he said, "but we don’t have time for that right now."
"This is just like before," she said, and for a moment John worried that she was going to go catatonic on him, forcing him either to leave her, which would be unthinkable, or to carry her, which would be undoable while fighting his way through crazies and people who turned into zombies.
She quickly shook herself out of it, though, walking with him to the master bedroom. As soon as she was through the door, he swung it closed behind them. It shut silently, but with a grim and disturbing finality, like the door of a tomb sliding shut with not even a last whisper of comfort for the dead.
***
Malachi looked up the stairwell, searching for movement. Deirdre stood directly behind him, her pant legs stained from the knees down with Gabriel’s blood and brains.
Behind her stood Jenna, checking to see if her secondary gun - a powerful Magnum - was loaded. Blood dripped steadily from her mouth, down her chin, and onto the floor. The bright red of the blood contrasted starkly with her pale complexion and blonde hair. She looked like a vampire, a devil that had just fed and yet still hungered. A strange kind of toothless vampire, though. Malachi could tell from the way her lip hung that most of her teeth had been smashed out of her mouth.
"Jenna, cover the front. Deirdre, go around back. I’m going to go up and either kill them or flush them out to you."
The women nodded, quietly exiting the house.
Malachi started up the stairs.
***
John looked around the room, trying to spot anything that might help them. He left the lights off, though, so as not to give away their position in an otherwise darkened house. That made seeing a bit difficult, but he could make out enough to start thinking of a way to escape this waking nightmare.
The room was decorated the same as the living room: trophies, calendars, and a preponderance of red. No guns, though. In their place, Gabe had chosen to hang a pair of old-fashioned railroad conductors’ lamps on two of the walls. Before flashlights, the conductors had used the red kerosene lanterns to warn oncoming engines to reduce their speed or that a track change was coming up. Two of those antique warning lights now hung from the walls of the dead man’s home, ancient but still useable. Unfortunately, John didn’t see any immediate need for a warning signal. He was already all too aware that he and Fran were in grave danger, and did not think lighting a lamp to commemorate that fact would do much in the way of getting them out of peril.
John didn’t see anything that looked immediately useful. He knew that an eve extended about three feet around the outside of the house between the first and second floor. If they could get to it, they would be able to jump safely to the ground and run away. He moved to the bedroom window, hoping that their attackers were all inside looking for them. But as soon as he approached the window a shot blasted the windowpane to splinters. He quickly ducked and moved to the back of the room, near Fran. He assumed that there were still just the three remaining people after him, Malachi and his insane two-person harem, but he didn’t know for sure. It was entirely possible that they could have sent for reinforcements who were waiting outside for them. Either way, he and Fran couldn’t get out the window without being killed.
Who are these people? John pondered as he looked around the room. Again, the planted story in the news indicated some level of government involvement. So maybe the attackers were black ops agents. John didn’t think so, however. They were too uncoordinated. And Malachi didn’t look like someone that the military would use for anything but target practice. Unstable, clearly insane.
Still, John knew the government must be involved in some way. They had to be; that was the only explanation for the bogus news story and the APB that was certainly circulating among nearby law enforcement officials. But he had no idea what it was he could have done that would warrant Uncle Sam’s sudden interest. Maybe it had something to do with Fran, he mused.
That would make sense. There was no denying that Malachi’s group was after her for some reason, and it would be too much of a stretch to think that the government’s involvement was with regard to an unrelated matter. However, when he had pressed her for answers she hadn’t been able to give him any. He had sensed at several times in the evening that she was hiding something, though whether she hid it from him alone or from herself as well he could not be certain. Still, he was sure that whatever it was, her knowledge did not extend to an understanding of why they were being pursued.
He glanced at Fran to see how she was holding up. Her complexion was still pasty, but she gave him a thumbs-up.
He smiled back, and wished he felt half as confident as he was trying to look. He still had not managed to find anything that might help them escape. No hope filled him, only despair and discouragement.
He had the very real feeling they were both going to die.
DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
8:53 PM MONDAY
Malachi stood at the top of the stairs. The hallway extended in only one direction, with four doors lining it.
Each would have to be opened. He knew that as he opened each door and peered into the rooms beyond, he would be highly vulnerable. But he had to send the women outside to cover the house, so that could not be helped. He would simply have to be careful, and trust in God to protect him.