Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

These were the ones who must’ve breached the mall somehow, compromised a barrier or overwhelmed a guard, forced their way in and found their prey captive and defenseless, trapped in a prison of their own making. Who knows how many they’d devoured until, momentarily sated, they’d let some of their prey live. And those, the newly turned, were the ones who doomed the rest. Just as Owen’s curse would have spread like wildfire throughout the Edenites had he lived, the barely feverish had doomed the other mall-dwellers until the entire place was one giant festering nest of Beaters, all of them longing for uninfected flesh.

It was nothing she hadn’t seen before, nothing any of them hadn’t seen before, except, perhaps, for the Easterners, so perhaps Davis could be forgiven his terror, his desperate attempt at self-preservation that left Cass reeling and struggling to hold on to Ruthie.

“Come on,” Smoke yelled again, waiting until she took his hand. Ruthie was heavy and restless in her other arm, wakened from her peaceful afternoon slumber yet again by tragedy and disaster.

Cass could tell that Smoke’s strength was ebbing, his body racked with pain and his muscles weak, but he kept up the pace past a cosmetics store, a kitchenware shop, to a clothing store that still, all these many months after the final shopper overpaid for the last logo-embroidered shirt, still reeked of a signature cologne.

Cass had hated malls, the chemical smells and lack of natural light, the forced cheer of the window displays featuring impossibly thin mannequins and spotless suburban tableaus, all of the tableware and underpinnings and electronic toys and scented candles, the thousand varieties of crap that didn’t even add up to a single decent meal Aftertime. All of this, the entire compendium of suburban marketing fraud, coursed through Cass’s mind as she allowed Smoke to shove her and Ruthie inside the somewhat fortified store.

“I’m going back for your dad and Zihna,” he said, and then, in the dim mote-speckled light of a postconsumer skylight, in what had been a shopping mecca Before, he seemed to be about to kiss her.

He stared into her eyes and ran his fingers through her hair and pulled her closer, but in the last minute, one of them hesitated, one of them flinched, and Cass would always wonder which of them it had been, because all she remembered of the moment was the cornflower-blue of his eyes and the regret that he couldn’t love her enough, couldn’t love her as much as his cherished ideal of justice.

In the next instant he was gone.

SMOKE HAD SEEN carnage and Smoke had killed men, but the blood-slicked panorama before him caused him to suck in his breath. For a moment he thought he’d vomit, and he leaned over the stuccoed wall, heaving and gulping air, ready to unloose himself onto the vinyl sofa directly below.

The moment passed, in a second, a fraction of a second. Disgust was not an emotion he could afford to indulge. Smoke swallowed down his bile and plunged forward.

At the entrance, half a dozen citizens were throwing themselves against the doors, using their bodies as battering rams. Locking the exits from within-the shelterers had mistakenly believed they were making their small world safer, protecting their number from the temptation of outside, never anticipating the horror they’d accidentally spawned. Smoke could not help them now: at this point his focus needed to be on the threat of the moment.

The Beaters had dragged off their first victim, a slender middle-aged woman with long, graying hair they wrapped through their decrepit fingers for leverage. Smoke recognized her-she’d asked him if she could help him when his bum leg gave him trouble, offered him half of her lunch, but now she was being shoved facedown on the floor in the entrance of a Hallmark card shop. Behind the broken glass windows were canting displays holding Mother’s Day and graduation cards and gifts-because it had been that season, hadn’t it, a year ago when things fell apart? The woman screamed and gargled in terror as the creatures yanked her limbs straight out and knelt on them. He could hear the ripping of her clothes as they were torn away. Her back was smooth and pale, and then it disappeared under the four monstrous heads as they assaulted with their wide greedy mouths, their sharp and tearing teeth.

“Anyone who’s armed, help me,” he bellowed, shooting into the writhing mass. One of the Beaters squawked and fell away, its face slimed with blood and its mouth wide and grimacing, but immediately squirmed back into the feeding frenzy, dragging one bloodied arm uselessly at its side.

No one seemed to have heard him, so Smoke shot at the doors, hitting the reinforced metal above their heads. The sound echoed all around them, and several people screamed or fell and the crowd tried to run in both directions. “If no one helps me we’re all going to die here,” he yelled before turning back to the Beaters.

He edged closer to the mass, trying to find his opportunity. He managed to get a clear shot at the woman when one of the Beaters threw his head back to tear a long strip of flesh from her back down near her buttock. Smoke aimed for the back of her head and tried not to see it burst, focusing instead on the Beaters, now sprayed with her blood and brains and enraged to find their quarry unresponsive.

Their angry cries ricocheted and echoed down the mall, and he glanced down the corridor to the farthest end where people poured out of a JCPenney, a dozen, two dozen, more of them. From this distance they looked normal, orderly, a congregation emptying out after church, fans leaving a stadium, patrons leaving a bar at closing time-only they walked with a certain shuffling, unsteady gait and they bumped into each other and occasionally lifted their fingers to their lips and chewed.

The new ones. The ones who, if they’d come a week earlier, would have still been living here as survivors, not so different from the people of New Eden or the people of any shelter, making the best of things, trying to scrape together enough optimism to see them through another day, when somehow-a door forced open? an HVAC duct? a tear in the cheap stucco wall, the things’ hunger driving them to tear and chew through insulation, plaster, whatever it took until they reached the inside of the mall?-the Beaters got in.

And all it would have taken was a few bites. A population like this, trapped, no light at night, all those halls and empty shops and dark corners for hiding like this-it would have spread geometrically, madly, instantly. With nowhere to go, the mall sealed shut tight save the one breach, the uninfected didn’t stand a chance. Hordes of the things outside, inside would still seem more survivable…

All of this flashed through Smoke’s mind while he was shooting, then reloading from the stash in his pocket. There was more ammo on the trailer-but the trailer was out there, in the parking lot. The bullets were slippery in his hands, maybe twenty of them, and he jammed them into the cylinder with shaking hands while the Beaters grew frustrated with their immobile, unresponsive meal and howled their disappointment.

They liked it alive. They’d eat a dead body if they had to, but with far less zeal. They’d wander away from it and circle back, grazing on the corpse for a few days as children might pick at a fruit bowl if denied their Halloween candy. But for now, with the air pungent with the scent of living citizens, they would lose interest in the dead woman and come after the fresh uninfected.

In fact it was already happening. Two of them had turned away from the woman’s blood-soaked, naked body and were crawling, slipping on her blood, toward the crowd of terrified people. One tried to rise, slipped, and fell down again, its elbow cracking on the hard floor. Smoke’s damp and trembling fingers had not managed to load the entire cylinder but there was no time, and he jammed it shut and fired the way he’d practiced so many mornings in the Box, on the fly, his body turning already to the next target.