Dwellers of the Night: The Complete Collection (71 page)

Adrian tried to get to the generator once more, but she shoved him back again. He hit the wall with a rough impact, and he cursed her.

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She remained unfazed. “Don’t you see?” she exclaimed. “This is God’s doing! I was wrong the entire time! The elite were not saved! It was the elite who became the vampires! It is written that redemption is found in the blood! To become a vampire is to be what God desires us to be! To become a vampire is to be freed from the constraints of this life; it is to be free, in the primal nature, as God wants us to be free! Mankind has elevated himself to the status of divinity, claiming to be gods in thought and deed, and now God is putting mankind back in its place by returning us to the animal base! We must honor God! We must join the league of the vampires!”

Adrian tried to reason with her, but she would have none of it. “Redemption is found in the
blood
, Adrian! We must honor God! We must experience redemption!” Her eyes darted between the two of them, begging them to agree with the insanity that had poisoned her mind. “Only by becoming a dark-walker can we be saved! Only by being bitten, only by our blood being spilled, can we be redeemed! Isn’t it clear to you?” The man and Adrian wore numb expressions, unable to comprehend what she had been saying, and she was surprised by their shock; couldn’t they see how clear it all truly was? “Christ has promised freedom. This is His deliverance, the fulfillment of His promises, the securing of our salvation…”

Adrian cursed her: “That’s enough of this shit.”

He moved forward; Carla moved in front of him.

“Get out of my way,” Adrian growled.

“You
must
accept the truth,” she pleaded. “Please! Accept the truth!”

“The truth is that you’re out of your damned mind.”

She stepped closer, hands clasped as if in prayer. “Adrian…”

He grabbed her by the arm and swung her away; she stumbled over a pipe coming out of the floor and fell to the ground. Adrian knelt down beside the generator, and in the lamplight could see the wires behind the panel torn as if by a knife. This confused him, and he heard the man’s shout; he turned to see Carla upon him, the firelight dancing over the contours of a kitchen steak knife, gripped tight between her twin hands. Adrian lifted his hands to protect himself, but she dodged around to his side and drove the knife into his flesh. He let out a shout and twisted onto the ground; she ripped the blade from his side, revealing a fountain of gushing blood, and she drove the blood-speckled blade into his chest. The man leapt forward, grabbed Carla by the hair, flung her into the generator: her head smashed against the aluminum siding, and she collapsed to the floor with a grunt, unmoving.

The man knelt down beside Adrian, who lied on his back, arms outstretched, fingers twitching. His face contorted, and his eyes were clenched shut, his breathing jagged. He tried to lift his head, but let out only a shout of white-hot, lightning pain. His head collapsed to the floor, and he sucked in several deep breaths, moaning.

“Don’t try to move,” the man said, voice a harsh whisper. “Don’t try to move.”

His eyes opened, and the man could see hopelessness hidden behind the veil of pain.

“Adrian…” he begged, gripping the boy’s hand.

The boy began coughing, and blood dribbled around his lips. The man squeezed the boy’s hand tighter, and the boy’s coughs subsided, replaced by gurgling rhythms. The man realized what was happening, and rage billowed through his veins.
The knife pierced his lungs. He’s drowning in his own
blood
. He held Adrian’s hand until his eyes slid shut and the gurgling stopped. Adrian lay cold and silent upon the floor, blood-painted lips frozen in a contorted half-scream.

It took a moment for the man to gather his thoughts. He pulled the belt from around his waist, lifted Carla up from the ground. He tied her hands together with his belt, then tied the belt around a series Anthony Barnhart

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of pipes jutting from the wall. Her eyes fluttered open, and she saw the man standing before him. He just stared at her, and he felt the urge to wrap his hands around her throat, to squeeze as tight as he could, to feel her body writhing for oxygen, her eyes bulging, face turning purple. He could already feel the sweet sensation of her death in his hands.

She stammered, “It’s the… the will of… the will of God.”

Kill her. Kill her.
“You’re a bitch.”

And he left her alone in the room,

shutting the door,

her only company that of the corpse that continued to bleed.

The man ran into Sarah outside the room.

“What happened?” she asked.

He pointed to the generator room behind him. “Don’t untie her.”

She moved forward, pushed open the door, let out a gasp.

He stood behind her. “She’s crazy. Don’t listen to her.”

Sarah shook her head, not understanding.

“She broke the generator. Do you think you can fix it?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

“Well, try, will you?”

Carla began preaching as Sarah knelt beside the generator.

The man walked over to the nutcase and slapped her across the face.

“You shut the fuck up, got it?”

She didn’t say anything more.

“I can’t fix it,” Sarah said. “Not without a soldering iron.”

“We don’t have one.”

“I know.” She looked at the man. “Does this control the floodlights?”

The man nodded, the answer nearly unmentionable. “Yeah.”

“Shit.”

“I know.”

“This is bad.”

“I know.”

Kyle remained alone on the roof, watching the dark-walkers. His insides turned to butter as the fiends pressed against the weak sections of the fence. His heart began to race as one of the sides of the fence tore, and the fence wobbled, breaking. Dark-walkers began flooding through to the other side, climbing the hill towards the church, most half-crawling amidst their hunger-starved exhaustion. Kyle’s heart screamed as he raised the rifle. The dark-walkers glared at him, their eyes twinkling under the full moon. There were more than he could count, and he began taking shots with his rifle. Several of them fell, bodies riddled and heads exploded, limbs hewn from the sockets, their blood soaking into the moist grass. They kept coming. He began reloading another magazine, hoping to God that they’d be able to figure out what was wrong with the generator and get it running again.
Because if they don’t… we’re fucked.

“Did you hear that?” Sarah asked.

“Gunfire,” the man said, the word heavy as an anvil between his lips. Anthony Barnhart

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They abandoned Carla, who began screaming at them, and they rushed up the stairwell and into the sanctuary. They were nearing the stairs towards the roof as the sound of shattering glass carried into their ears. They stopped dead in their tracks, amidst the pews, and suddenly the wooden boards covering the stained glass windows began to break apart. They backed into the wall, staring in gutridden terror, amidst the flickering glow of the room’s candles, as hands burst through the wooden boards, gnarled and ghostly white, the overgrown and ingrown fingernails scraping along the boards, groping in the air. Their shrieks filled the air. Color drained from the man’s face.
It’s
happening. It’s happening
. And then,
I hate being right all the time
. Sarah took off towards the women’s sleeping quarters. The man watched her go, glanced up the stairwell, cursed, and headed down an adjacent corridor leading to the men’s sleeping rooms.

The boards over the windows continued to fall.

The echoes of peppered gunshots swept through the church halls.

Harker’s door burst open. The man leapt in.

“What the hell is going on?” Harker demanded, hearing the gunfire. The man’s face, white as snow, held no betrayal: “Something bad has happened.”

“How bad?”

“Pretty bad.”

Sarah threw open the door to Katie’s room.

She continued to sleep, a smile splashed across her face.

Sarah grabbed her by the shoulder, violently shook.

She jolted from sleep, shaking with shock. She rubbed her eyes.

“Get up!” Sarah shouted. “Get up!”

Katie cursed her. “What the hell are you doing?”

“They’re getting inside!” Sarah shouted. “They’re getting inside!”

Katie immediately understood, and the smile from her dream faded to nothing.

Anthony heard shouting coming from the floor above, followed by gunshots. He quickly wiped and pulled up his pants, setting the book on the floor. He lifted the oil-lamp, strained his ears. He could hear more shouting above, more gunfire.
What the hell is going on?
He pushed open the door and stepped into the darkness of the stone corridor. The light dappled over the cobbled stonework along the walls, the arched stone ceiling. This was the deepest region of the church, firmly secluded and hidden, an antique corridor that ran underneath the basement. But not even the hallway’s depth could hide the turmoil above. A million possible scenarios leapt like wild stallions through his mind, and he began moving down the corridor, towards the stairwell leading up to the basement.

All the men had been awakened. Harker unlocked the door to the storage closet, and he moved inside, grabbing M16s from a shelf, extra magazines of ammunition, passing them out to the men. Mark waited his turn, took one of the machineguns. Harker gave quick instructions: head straight to the sanctuary and neutralize any threat, then get to the roof and finish the job. Mark hoped it would be that simple, but he remembered the man’s words several weeks ago:
This place is meant to keep the
dark-walkers out. But, ultimately, it keeps us inside
. A chill ran through him as he took off down the hallway, following several older men whose names he had never learned.

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Nancy, the wonderful and compassionate nurse, gathered the women together and herded them into a large room with tall windows and a lockable door. The room had served as their medical center, and Harker had told her the importance of holing up in there if a break-in had ever occurred. She had never expected the moment to happen, but she had been readily prepared, and she operated with a cool collectiveness that quieted even the most violent sobs. She threw the lock on the door, and they huddled together, listening to the sounds of the distant shrieks and more gunfire coming from the rooftop. Nancy quickly took a headcount and realized three women were missing: Sarah, Carla, and Katie.

Sarah and Katie joined the men, having grabbed M16s from the closet. The men had first opposed the women joining them, demanding they return to the room with the other women, a room promising protection; but Mark had interceded, vouching for them—“We may need all the gun-power we can get.” Harker had let them come—as if his authority meant anything anymore—and they continued down the corridor towards the sanctuary.

As the corridor bent, opening up to the Great Room, they heard pews being shoved and shifted around. They spilled into the sanctuary to find dark-walkers crawling through the windows, and several had already found themselves moving aimlessly between the pews. As if on cue, the men and two women raised their weapons and began firing. The darkness of the room became bathed in splashes of white-hot light, and the sound burnt everyone’s hearing to a crisp. Dark-walkers screeched and howled, bodies torn apart, heads bursting, blood and brain-matter forming rainbows in the air before splashing onto the pews and carpet. More dark-walkers poured into the sanctuary, dodging the bodies of fallen comrades; they gained strength in numbers and charged the men and women with guns. The people scattered, taking off in various directions, horrified for their lives. Katie, Mark, and several others headed into the bowels of the church; the man, Harker, and the others took off up the spiral stairwell leading to the rooftop access and the friar’s cryptic office. Not all escaped: the dark-walkers had fallen upon one man, ripping the limbs from his body, bathing in his blood; they gripped his head in their hands and twisted it off at the neck, raising it high like a memorial to a forgotten pagan god. Another man had rushed up towards the baptismal, and he stood his ground underneath the cross, his gun blazing. He ran out of ammunition; dark-walkers leapt at him, and he swung the butt of the M16 into their faces, knocking them awry; but they overcame him, and he fell into the baptismal waters, held underneath, his screams merely bubbles rising to the surface as their teeth clamped over his neck: the water turned red with his blood, and his kicking legs ceased to splash, and he lay still under the water as the dark-walkers celebrated by gnawing at his ruptured flesh.

The gunshots sounded much closer. Anthony had climbed the stairs leading to the basement, and he was faced with the impermeable darkness. He began moving through the large basement, past the tables where they had eaten countless meals for countless months; but he stopped short, hearing heavy breathing in the shadows.

He turned and raised the oil-lamp, his blood freezing in the caskets of his veins. The light cast its rays through the blackness, illuminating a brutalized face with sunken eyes, yellowed teeth opened to reveal a mouth filled with drool. A great cut had been slashed across the zombie’s forehead, and gnats crawled amidst the scab. Anthony’s eyes locked with the eyes of the creature, and the zombie let out a bloodcurdling shriek and rushed forward; but the table intercepted its pursuit, and it toppled down, scattering plates and cups with its impact; it slid off the table, landing amongst several chairs. The oil-lamp rocked back-and-forth in Anthony’s hand as he rushed towards the stairs, Anthony Barnhart

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hearing the zombie scrambling to its feet. He reached the stairwell but heard more dark-walkers above, in the sanctuary. He turned on his heels, surrounded, and the lamplight reflected off the zombie’s façade as it closed in on him. Anthony let out a sudden scream of fright and swung the oillamp through the air; it shattered against the zombie’s face, the oil soaking the head, the flame spreading. Anthony fell against the wall as the creature ran madly about the room, face ablaze with burning oil, an incendiary torch with legs. The stench of burnt flesh filled the room like ungodly incense, and Anthony watched with a mute expression as the zombie circled like a bird in flight. It toppled down, pitching to the ground in a sputtering mass of flesh and flame.