“Just do what I did… what I tried to do. Swing that fucker with all your might and keep going until that shit is out of the way.”
Joanna Hensky may have been a non-remarkable mayor, but she was a big woman with plenty of strength in her arms and back. The axe blade sunk all the way through the wall on her first try. Fred helped her pull it back out, tearing big chunks of plaster along the way. “Good girl,” he gasped. “Now hit it again.”
Joanna swung and missed the wall altogether. The blade struck against the concrete floor in a shower of sparks. She tried again, found the mark, and another two feet of ancient gyp-rock collapsed away.
“That’s enough,” Fred said as she prepared for another strike. “We can pull the rest away with our hands.”
They went at it, each pulling larger sections away on either side. A minute later they had cleared enough away to see well enough what was behind. There was a second wall, the one Joanna had spoken of upstairs in her office. It was made of dull brown bricks and crumbling mortar. Fred made an exasperated gasp, but Joanna saw something in the shadows between the plaster on the edges they’d torn away. “There’s a wooden sheet or door a bit further over.” She picked the axe back up and wedged the handle in, tearing away more of the plaster. It made a creaking noise as ancient nails pulled free from two-by-four joists separating the walls.
A larger section of wall fell away revealing a sheet of rough, warped plywood set into the bricks. Fred saw a piece of rope tied to a nail in the wood, it was tied on the other end to a ring worked into the brick. There were rusted hinges on the other side. Fred untied the rope and tried swinging the five-foot high, three-foot wide sheet of wood back towards them. It didn’t budge.
Joanna pushed him aside and kicked at a bottom edge. The sheet popped open at the top corner, and a dank rush of cool, mouldy-smelling air rushed out. Fred bent over and peered into the black door crack. “This is it! This is the tunnel.” He pulled at the top edge and the small door scraped open along the concrete floor.
Joanna shook her head and stepped back. “No… this wasn’t a good idea. I won’t… I can’t go in there.”
“Claustrophobia?”
The woman’s big head started bobbing up and down instead of wagging side to side. “Yes, since I was a little girl. It’s terrible.”
Fred reached for her hand. It felt cold and clammy. He could see the fear in her eyes focused in on that black slit, and he could only imagine at what terrible things she thought might be waiting inside the tunnel. “We have to go. There’s no other choice.”
“I won’t.”
Fred started in. “I’ll go a little ways. You’ll see there isn’t anything to fear. You can hold my hand the entire way. But we have to go , Joanna.”
She was shaking her head again. “I won’t.”
The door at the top of the basement landing slammed open. Fred craned his head back through the escape tunnel opening and saw black boots descending the stairs. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the military uniform. Whatever siege had befallen the town had passed. The military had defeated, or at least held back, whatever it was trying to enter Brayburne.
He saw the soldier’s face a moment later and realized it was Corporal Stevens. And then he saw that the corporal’s eyes had been plucked out of their sockets. Blood and syrupy black liquid were oozing down his grey cheeks, and dripping onto his shirt and pants.
“Corporal Stevens?” The doctor asked quietly. “Adam… are you okay?”
The thing that had once been a living person opened its mouth and made a low, guttural sound. Its bottom jaw continued dropping open—farther than the bone could allow—and its neck swelled up. A gusher of thick black pushed its way out and plopped down on the remaining steps before it like great piles of cow shit. The mayor backed into the plaster remains of the inner wall and placed her hands over her mouth. Fred grabbed one of her thick wrists and started yanking her into the tunnel. “No more time, dear. You’re going to have to get over your phobia a lot faster than you would’ve liked.”
She didn’t argue. Her stiff body loosened in jerks, and moments later she was in the tunnel behind the old doctor, holding his hand and moving her feet without realizing where she was, or what she was doing. One crippling old fear had run smack-dab into a new impossible horror. They had cancelled each other out, putting an end to whatever reasoning bits remained in her brain.
“You’ll be alright, Joanna,” Fred spoke softly.
Mayor Hensky kept moving her feet in the dark. She didn’t make a sound as one of her shoes caught in a dry rift of dirt and pulled free of her foot. She didn’t yell as her meaty shoulder scraped along sections of rough stone and cut her skin open. She didn’t cry out when the bloated corpse of Corporal Adam Stevens moved into the tunnel behind them. She just kept holding the old doctor’s hand, and she kept moving her feet one in front of the other.
Fred continued whispering soft mumblings of comfort to the woman as he led her down the dark tunnel. He looked over his shoulder and saw the dead soldier pursuing them . And he was dead, Fred realized. No human body could release that much fluid and waste—and still remain so terribly bloated—without being dead. Something else was in control of him now. He had no eyes to see with, but this something was still guiding his movement, and he was moving remarkably fast for a swollen corpse. Fred couldn’t see a thing in front of them. All he had to go on was Joanna’s word and the faded pencil scrawls of an eighty-year old map that the tunnel they were in would lead them to safety. It seemed like a short distance on paper, but travelling through the pitch black, hunched over as they were, and breathing in stale old air, made the half-mile span seem much longer. His already strained heart would likely give out long before they arrived at the tunnel’s end—if there even was one. It hadn’t been used in decades.
Corporal Stevens howled out behind them. It was an eerie, inhuman sound that seemed to be right on their backs. Fred glanced back one more time over Joanna’s shoulder and saw the soldier gaining quickly. Jets of black were spewing forward out of his eye sockets. It began spraying out of both nostrils. The sound coming out of his distended mouth was like something drowning.
We won’t make it. I’m going to have a heart attack. We’ll die of asphyxiation. Adam’s going to eat us.
Joanna’s fingers slipped out of his. Fred stumbled forward onto his knees and looked back. She was still holding the fire escape axe in her other hand. Adam was closing the gap between them. There wasn’t enough room to get a decent swing going, but the mayor of Brayburne charged towards him anyway.
Good for you, Joanna. I wish I’d voted for you.
Chapter 35
Tommy stuck to the shadows and stayed away from the light of the raging fires that were bringing the small town down all around him. The things the dead soldiers and survivors were transforming into were rising faster than the diminishing soldiers left living. The raging corpses seemed drawn to the flames, as if something inside their bloating bodies was making them stay close to the heat. Tommy avoided the clusters of fighting. He kept moving west. Eventually he made it to the outskirts of Brayburne, collapsing into a ditch and clutching at his broken ribs. He could barely breathe. The screams from town were quietening, the gunfire less constant. Whatever had taken those people and turned them into freaks was winning. Good. Fuck them. Let the whole goddamn town burn.
He staggered back to his feet after a few minutes and started walking out into the dark. He left the highway and stumbled out into a dusty, dry field. Stay off the roads. Can’t let those things find me on the highway… Can’t let anyone see how fucked up I am.