“About this time last year,” I said wistfully, “a hundred kids would have come out in costumes and begun working the doorbells.”
“Yeah,” sighed Vance. “I miss the little bastards. Even the night they hammered my pickup with eggs. I even miss that.”
I squinted out into the storm and watched the chain link fence creak and sway in the growing winds. When lightning flashed, the wet links formed a brilliant pattern of squares for a brief moment. The chains that secured the gate clinked and rattled and shook.
The lightning flashed again, and outside, past the gate, I thought I saw a shape move. Probably, it was just branch, or a bit of debris from a house roof that had been caught up in a gust of wind. Probably.
“Who has the shotgun?” I asked sharply.
“I gave it to Nick Hackler. Don’t know if he has a clue how to use it. Everyone is armed now, even Holly has that pig-sticker of hers.”
“Where’s the Captain?”
“He went off, would you believe, back to his place to get some more ammo. Crazy bastard.”
“In this storm?” I shook my head. I didn’t think he was out to get ammo at this late date. I knew him now and understood his thinking. He didn’t want to be trapped in our little cage when things hit the fan. He wanted be outside, flanking the enemy. But telling Vance this would make him think we had been abandoned, so I just said, “I hope he gets back before things get-wild.”
“Where’s the Preacher?” ask Vance.
“He’s got Nick and a few others at the back door. You, me and Jimmy are covering this one. The rest are in the command post.”
Vance chuckled at the lofty term command post. The dentist’s offices were in the center of the three sections of the center, and we had fortified that inner area with blockaded doors and supplies, in case things went bad.
“You think she’s coming after us tonight, this Hag of yours?”
In answer to his question I pointed out into the lashing rain. The window had fogged up a bit, and the rain had turned into silver-white streaks, where you could see it at all, catching the light from the lanterns that burned in the center.
“What?” asked Vance, craning his neck and smearing a hole in the misted-up glass.
“The gate,” I told him.
He stared out into the storm for perhaps ten seconds. He could tell something was wrong. Then he realized the gates hung open. “Where are the locks? Where are those chains? I put them on myself.”
“Look down,” I said quietly.
“Ah I see them. Hey, they’re moving!” this last he shouted and several nervous sets of eyes came to rest on backs.
I didn’t shush him. I did not try to hide it from the others. Everyone would have to know soon enough. Something had changed our rusty chains into a writhing lump of chain-shaped snakes that even now were struggling not to drown in the vicious rains. They twisted and slithered free of the last of the chain link diamonds that ensnared their bodies. The sagging, homemade gate they had held tightly together hung open about a foot or so.
“It could just be the storm, right Gannon?”
I shook my head, I didn’t think so. Armed silent people moved up behind us and peered out the windows. Carlene took her baby into the back, her kid over one shoulder and a revolver in the other hand.
I pulled the Hag’s gift from my pocket, the sharpening stone stamped by her hoof, and I began sharpening my saber with long strokes. Orange sparks leapt from the blade and the bluish glow intensified. Vance looked at the stone, my gloved, misshapen hand and the sword. He licked his lips, breathing hard, and for once said nothing.
Outside, the gates burst open and dark shapes, moving fast and low to the ground, poured through into the parking lot.
It had begun.
Thirty-Six
The air stunk of cordite and still everyone kept firing and still the things kept coming. They were wolves. But they weren’t natural wolves, they came in wide variety of all sizes and they wore collars. I realized they weren’t originally wolves, but had started life as all the town dogs we’d known and played with and hated when they barked too long at night-together all of them charged our walls in a pack. There had to be a hundred of them, wolves the size of schnauzers and rottweilers and collies and random mutts. We shot them as they came and they went down, but sprang up again, yellow teeth snapping and snarling. They stank of rot and evil. Some of them had bones showing through their fur. Their eyes shined in the night and they threw themselves at the windows and chewed at our makeshift door. Why hadn’t we built a proper door? It was plywood for heaven’s sake. It would never hold against a determined assault, even if the Hag didn’t change it into a wriggling sheet of slimy flesh or something equally horrible.
A small wolf the size of a fox got in and went for my boot. It was some kind of terrier I imagined in a previous life and I kicked it away quickly before a wolf the size of a big guard dog that was in and on me. I went down with the weight of its body and this one was smarter, if such a thing can be said of such an unnatural beast, it went for my throat with broken fangs and torn black lips. Vance put several rounds into it with a pistol like the one he’d given me and it stopped functioning. It was then I noticed that Holly was kneeling over the smaller one, stabbing it with her huge knife over and over, even though it had stopped moving. I didn’t feel bad, these creatures were already dead.
“More,” Vance panted in my ear as he helped me back to my feet. “More things are coming in through the gate.”
The next wave was full of scuttling vines and walking rosebushes. The vines moved low to the ground, their dried up flowers and leaves were brown and wilted, but their questing, snaking tendrils were still supple and lashed at us like whips. The rosebushes were worse, their thumb-thick rattling branches being covered in thorns. I made good use of my saber against them, slashing and hacking, but soon my hands and legs were bleeding.
“Gannon!” I heard a cry from the back, I wasn’t sure who it was, maybe Nick or Nelson. “They’re coming into the basement!”
“Hold the door if you can, fall back to the dentist’s offices if we lose the door,” I told Vance and the others that were making their stand in the lobby.
I turned and ran back into the offices. I had to get the doors down into the basements shut and barricaded. They couldn’t be allowed to get into the middle of us. Holly Nelson ran with me. True to her pledge, she was following me everywhere I went.
Monika and Mrs. Hatchell were already there with the rest of the Nelsons. Mr. Nelson looked scared but had two pistols resting in holsters he’d rigged up by stapling them to the sides of his wheelchair. He had big arms, like many men who are wheelchair bound, and I knew he’d make a good accounting of himself if anything got this far past our defenses.
I grabbed Monika by the arm. “Get hammers and nails.”
Behind the nurses’ station was the door that went down into the basement from this section. If anything got in down there it could come up the stairs and into the middle of us. I put my shoulder against the door and grabbed hold of the doorknob with my good hand, preventing it from turning.
“Is anyone down there?” I asked Nelson.
Nelson shook his head. His face was white. “Holly,” he said, “You stay back in here with me.”
Holly didn’t say anything to her father. There wasn’t even a look of pain or defiance on her face; it was as if she hadn’t heard him.
“Mind your daddy, now,” I told her, mostly for Nelson’s sake. I knew she wouldn’t.
She just stared at me and the door I was holding closed. I knew her only thought was of how to back me up. I thought about cats that I’d met up with that had “gone feral” and turned wild. Her eyes were like that, she wasn’t really a kid anymore, no matter what she looked like. She was thinking at an animal level.