“You don’t know?” He was talking in a low voice.
She shook her head. “I fell asleep around midnight. The lights were still on then.”
“They went out around two o’clock.” He looked down at his wristwatch. “I don’t know what happened. One at a time, the lights started going out. Couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes. City just went dark.”
“Is it terrorists?”
“Hell no,” he said with absolute certainty. “It’s not terrorists. Nothing like that. I’ve seen things…” He shook his head and looked at her, as if trying to decide if he should tell her. “I don’t even know how to describe it. People die…then they come back, except they’re not the same. Sometimes they don’t even die. They get bitten and…just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “they’re one of those things.”
“What are they? Those ‘things’?”
He shook his head, trying to find the right words. “My roommate was attacked by this… I don’t know…it had black, wrinkled skin…”
“I’ve seen it…”
He nodded. “It’s not natural, right?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“What happened to your roommate?” she asked.
“He turned into one of those things. After he was bitten. I mean, I hit this thing with a pipe and it just…sort of shrugged it off. But I managed to get it out of the apartment. But Ed… Ed was gone. I don’t know when. I was sitting there with him trying to figure it out when he suddenly tried to bite me. I could tell it wasn’t him anymore, you know? I could just tell. It wasn’t Ed. Not anymore.”
He shivered in the dark.
“I barely got away,” he continued. “I’ve been running since. It started long before that. We got texts telling us shit was happening all over the city. It was all over the news, the Internet — everywhere. It started about five-thirty, I think. All I know is that as soon as it got dark—boom! Like a bomb went off. They were everywhere. Everywhere.” He stopped and leaned toward her. “You didn’t see it?”
“I was asleep,” she said, almost embarrassed. “I’ve been having problems sleeping, so I took some pills. I might have taken more than one.”
“You’re lucky. You don’t want to see what I’ve seen.” He looked toward the window. “It got really quiet real quick after that first initial burst of attacks. I think people realized what was happening and started hiding. It got so quiet. I was hiding, too, until a few hours ago when I heard a couple of them moving around me. I took off and ended up here.”
“I don’t see anything out there…”
“They’re out there, just not in the same numbers. In the last place I was hiding, I saw a whole army of them moving along the highway, heading out of the city.”
“Out of the city?”
“Yeah. It’s like they took the city, now they’re fanning out. I dunno.”
“Into the countryside?”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice drifting off slightly.
“Does your phone work?” she asked, remembering her battery-drained iPhone.
He fished a cellphone out of his pocket. It was an Android with a Houston Cougars cover on the back. He powered it up from sleep mode and shook his head. “No signal. Bars went dead around seven. Internet went down about the same time.”
Lara looked toward the window. “My roommate’s out there somewhere. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”
“You don’t want to be caught out there. Most of them are gone, but there are still a lot of them in the dark.”
“Where’s your building?”
“Holman and Adair. You know it?”
She nodded. There were three student housing buildings a couple of streets down from hers. The entire street was filled with students, thanks to its proximity to the University of Houston campus.
“By the way,” he said, “I’m Tony.”
“Lara.”
“Nice to meet you, Lara.”
“Yeah, you too.”
“Thanks for saving my life.”
“You’re welcome.”
At least I managed to save someone tonight.
Tony’s head snapped back to the window and he said in a quick, low voice, “Get down!”
He leaped off the couch and pressed down on the floor. Lara, on instinct, did the same thing next to the coffee table as the dark silhouette moved across the curtain.
The figure stopped at the window and turned its head, trying to look in. It was small and hunched over. A thin frame, almost skeletal, pressed against the window. The outline of a sharp head and pointy chin looked exaggerated in silhouette form.
She glanced at Tony. He put a finger to his lips, his other hand pressed down on the carpet as if getting ready to jump back up. She nodded and didn’t move, but almost let out an involuntary gasp when a second shadow appeared at the window.
She was struck by how unnaturally they moved. The way they turned their heads and arched them forward and up, then forward and down, reminding her of Velociraptor dinosaurs. Though they moved on two legs, there was nothing human about them. At least, not anymore. She couldn’t hear voices; they seemed to be communicating without sounds.
Then they were gone, moving past the window in the same way they had first appeared — without making any noise.
Tony didn’t move right away and, as a result, Lara didn’t either. He still looked coiled, ready to spring.
He finally pushed himself from the floor and sat against the couch. He said in a low voice, “You okay?”
She nodded and, following his example, sat on the floor with her back against the chair. “What should we do?”
“I don’t know. Keep trying to survive, I guess.” He glanced at his watch again. “It’ll be daylight in three hours.”
“You think it’ll be better when the sun comes up?”
“I don’t know. I’m hoping it will.”
“What do you base that on?”
“They didn’t come out until it got dark. Maybe that’s part of it. I don’t know. I’m just spitballing.”
She nodded. “It’s more than I have.”
He was staring at her with an almost curious look.
“What?” she said, a bit annoyed.
“You really slept through most of this?”
“Yes.”
“Damn,” he said, smiling, “it must have been a hell of a nap.”
Tony went to the Bauer College of Business at UH and was nine credits short of graduating. He had started school late, having gone to work right after high school and not even bothering to take his entrance exams until he was twenty. He was twenty-four now — just one year younger than Lara, which surprised her because he looked older — and he wasn’t even sure if a bachelor’s degree was going to be all that useful.
“My dad runs an auto body shop along the 610 and 290,” he said, referring to two of Houston’s busier freeways. “I’m supposed to take over one of these days.”
“You don’t sound as if you’re looking forward to it,” she said.
They were inside the kitchen, sitting on the cold floor tiles, eating melted ice cream and fruit and washing them down with bottled water. They were still talking in low voices, going quiet every time they thought they heard movement from the walkway outside. It was almost 3:00 a.m., three more hours until sunup. Lara hoped he was right, that daylight would bring salvation. It was almost too much to hope for, but what else did she have?
“Not really,” Tony said, “but it’s my dad, so it’s not like I have a choice.”
“Have you told him?”
“Tell my dad I don’t want the family business?” Tony grinned at her in the dark. “You don’t know my dad.”