B. Larson: Shifting

“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.

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.

Then the door I held closed shook with a heavy impact. I did not have any more time for reflection. Three more times it shivered as something threw itself against the other side with everything it had. The hinges creaked, but it held.

“Monika?” I shouted. “Where’s that hammer?”

The blows on the door stopped and for a moment there was no sound other than our puffing breath. Nelson had out his pistols and they were trained at the door in case I went down.

Then we heard a click, and a rattling sound. The lock had been opened. Then something twisted the doorknob in my hand. I grunted and strained to stop it, but the power of it was incredible, unnatural. I pulled out my other hand, my gloved hand, and clamped it onto the doorknob. It was a strain, but I stopped it, and even managed to ease it back a bit.

Then the door began shivering again as more blows rained down on it. I held on, my whole body shivering with the door and the impacts. Wood splintered and metal bits creaked and groaned. I could not hold it closed for long.

Monika and Mrs. H. showed up and started nailing strips of wood over the doorway. The hammers rang in my ears and I sweated, gripping the door with the unnatural strength of my shifted hand and leaning all my weight against the bulging wood. I was glad it was an old door, a solid door of the type they didn’t make anymore. It was a thick piece of varnished wood, well-built by craftsmen that were probably all dead now.

Soon, I felt brave enough to give up my hold on the door and help the women with the nailing.

“What’s down there?” asked Monika when we stopped, breathing, long enough to survey our work.

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s not a wolf. Wolves can’t twist knobs like that.”

There were screams coming from another part of the center.

I looked at Nelson. “Can you cover this?” I asked.

He nodded.

“If it starts to go, call us.”

“Don’t worry,” he said.

I ran down the hall and Holly followed me. Nelson didn’t call her back.

We were losing the lobby, I saw that right away when I got there. One of our two makeshift plywood doors was down and cold air and splatters of thick raindrops came in, staining the carpet.