Night of the Living Dead (11 page)

... then dismissed them, turning back to the house even as the newcomers ambled up behind it, as though joining its ranks.

Barbra shoved herself away from the window so hard she stumbled, nearly knocking over one of the dining table chairs. She fumbled to right it before it could fall over, and her shaking hands nearly made it worse. When the chair thankfully settled, she ran, ran, away from the window, away from those things, away, away ...

Back in the hallway, Barbra struggled to maintain
some
level of control. She would accomplish nothing, would be no closer to rescuing her poor brother if she collapsed, hyperventilating in the dark like a helpless child.

They’re coming to get you, Barbra ...

SHUT UP, JOHNNY! I’M TRYING TO FIND HELP FOR YOU!

She stumbled yet again, this time catching herself on the bannister—

A bannister! Yes, the farmhouse had a second floor, she had seen that from outside! Up, that’s where she needed to go, up and away from those things. From upstairs, she could peer down through the windows without their seeing her in return, maybe she would even find another phone, one that worked!

Up, she would go up.

But disappointment had been her constant companion since the attack in the cemetery, and this proved no different. She had barely climbed two of the stairs before catching a glimpse of something above her, something on the landing. She couldn’t make out what it was, but just as she had almost immediately labeled the newcomers outside as a threat, that same warning screamed in the back of her mind now.

Stretching out her arms to either side, supporting herself between wall and bannister, she ascended the stairs at a very slow, very timid pace. Halfway up, she could finally see what waited for her ... and yet her mind couldn’t accept what she was seeing. She knew what it looked like, but no ... surely it wasn’t ...

But it was. It was a body. A corpse. But that wasn’t what finally ripped a scream from her reluctant lips.

The person — a man? a woman? she couldn’t tell — had been mutilated. The face had been ripped to shreds as though eaten by some savage animal. The teeth were exposed where an upper lip should have been, drawn into a sickening rictus like a perverted smile. Drying, nearly black blood had congealed in the hair, hiding whatever natural color it had once been and leaving an apparent gap through the left temple and down into the brain cavity itself. The right eye was missing, but the left eye gaped its wild view upon the world, the eyelid torn, ripped,
chewed
away, leaving it staring into space. Staring at Barbra.

Something had eaten its face, and it was staring at her.

Too much. She was no longer sliding out of control. Control was gone, evaporated, her mind snapped.

Down the stairs, folding over the bannister to empty her belly, unable to find even that relief, running, running, the knife staying in her hand only by chance, through the hallway, through the dining room, to the foyer, to the front door, clawing at it, unlocking it, no thoughts of the creature or creatures outside, no thoughts at all save one faint echo, the mere glimmering of a true thought:
Johnny’s the lucky one.

The front door finally opening for her, she shoved the screen door aside as she burst into the night ...

... and into blinding light.

Bedazzled, Barbra collided with the porch post, which was all that kept her from taking a face-dive into the front yard. She heard a metallic
slam
from beyond the twins beams which struck a familiar chord, but she was beyond making sense of things. She reeled back, throwing her arms before her eyes to block the glare that threatened to excecate her.

Was she in Hell? Was
that
why she couldn’t get away from horror after horror?

Then a shape stepped forward to block the headlights—

(Headlights! That’s
what they were — headlights!)

—and she could see again. But would this prove any better?

She and the man in the sweater stared at each other, appraising. Barbra took another step back, but just as she had instinctively withdrawn from the previous two newcomers, something told her that this man was
not
a threat. For one thing, he was
studying
her with a leery-but-thoughtful expression in his eyes — not at all like the empty hunger of the thing that had chased her from the cemetery.

Speaking of ...

The creature had found its way around to this side of the house, and the man heard it. He looked over his shoulder, tensing. Barbra noticed, in a distant manner, that he carried a tire iron, and was poised to use it. Then he looked at Barbra again, hesitated, and instead of facing off with the creature, he pushed her back into the house. She resisted a little — hadn’t there been something in the house from which she had been desperate to escape? She couldn’t remember anymore. She ... she couldn’t
think
anymore.

Johnny ...

Ben slammed the door shut and locked it, relaxing — just a little — for the first time since his flight from Beekman’s Diner. He didn’t know who this young blonde woman was, but all he cared about was that she was
normal
. A little stunned, maybe, but he could live with that — he would take whatever help he could get tonight.

"It’s all right," he told the whimpering girl.

She just stared at him, as though waiting for him to do something.

Turning his back to the door, Ben looked around the dark house. He gripped the tire iron he had so thankfully found in the bed of the truck.

"Don’t worry about him," he assured her as he stepped away, "I can handle him." He peeked through a few of the windows — all clear, for now. "Probably be a lot more of them as soon as they find out about us." He circled back around, past the girl, checking things out, collecting information about his surroundings. Now that he was over his initial shock from this appalling night, he was back on top of his game.

Which brought him around to the next order of business. "The truck is out of gas," he explained, then gestured toward the side of the house with the tire iron. "This pump out here is locked. Is there a key?"

Nothing from the blonde. Just that stricken, child-like gaze.

Despite his initial relief at finding her, his frustration grew. "We can try to get out of here if we can get some gas. Is there a
key
?"

Still nothing.

Great
. He turned from her to hide and control his irritation — Lord only knew what she had already been through herself tonight! — and his eyes laid upon a telephone. He knelt before it and dialed the operator,
but got nothing
.

Movement behind him, but it was just the blonde. "I suppose you’ve tried this," he commented, more to himself than to her. He hung up, collected the tire iron, and followed after her into the hallway.

"Do you live here?" he asked. By now his guess was that she didn’t, but he was still hoping for
some
 kind of useful information from her.

But this time she didn’t even look at him. She was gazing up the stairs, her hand trembling before her face, her complexion pale and sallow. She began to quietly sob.

Ben peered up the stairs and saw that the girl had not been just staring blankly, but looking at something specific up on the landing. Gripping his tire iron, he climbed the stairs to investigate.

Before he reached the top, he found his breath drifting away. He had to pull himself up the bannister, hand over hand, to make it as far as he did. He gaped at the corpse with the eaten face as it stared back at him.

"Jesus ..." he whispered. After everything he had seen at Beekman’s Diner, he thought he had passed his shock threshold, though that nausea and disgust had been shoved aside by survival instincts. But in spite of what he’d witnessed with the janitor, old man Joe, and the others ... this masticated corpse still got to him in a way for which he was not prepared.

Rushing back down the stairs, he braced himself in the corner of the hallway for a moment, fighting to control both his gag reflex and his sanity. The girl remained slumped against the wall, clutching the kitchen knife to her chest and rocking gently side to side, staring into nothingness; if she had any reaction to Ben’s momentary breakdown, she gave no sign.

"We’ve gotta get out of here," Ben said when he could trust himself to speak. "We have to get to where there’s some other people." He touched her arm, trying to reassure her, before moving away.

Barbra stared after the man in the sweater as he disappeared down the hallway. Her thoughts were still muddy, but she knew she did
not
want to be alone anymore. She wanted to tell her new companion something about Johnny, but for the moment, she could not remember
what
it was about her brother that she needed to share.

Following after the man with slow, unsteady steps, she heard him saying from the kitchen, "We’d better take some food. I’ll see if I can find some food ..."

As Barbra inched her way down the hallway, she struggled to regain some equilibrium. She ran her hands along a sideboard, along the wall of the stairs. Real things,
normal
 things, everyday things that had nothing to do with vicious creatures lurking through her father’s cemetery, wandering around outside the house ...

A dripping sound drew her attention. She looked around, unable to locate the source. Was it coming from the kitchen? Had the man turned on the tap and left it ... but no, the sound was closer than that. It was here, in the hallway.

She looked down, then up. It was blood, dripping down in slow, syrupy strings from the body on the second-floor and collecting in a thick puddle very near her feet. Even as she noticed, some of it dripped onto her hand.

Biting against a yelp, Barbra pushed away from the wall, rushing into the living room and brushing the gooey, half-dried blood from her hand onto her coat. It was repulsive, but still ... the jolt served to snap her out of her fugue, if just a little, and for that (as sick as it sounded) she was grateful. Feeling a little more like herself again, she followed the man into the kitchen.

He was going through the drawers and the refrigerator, making more of a racket than she would have preferred. The sharp noise jabbed at her ears, triggering some of the haze to return, and she struggled to hold on to her focus, partial though it was. She noticed that the man had left his tire iron on top of the refrigerator and she picked it up — he glanced up and saw her doing so, but did not seem to mind. The iron was solid, comforting; in some ways, it made her feel better than her own knife.