B. Larson: Shifting

The things coming into the door weren’t wolves or plants now, but human shapes, mostly dressed in colorful summer clothes, when they wore anything at all. Jimmy Vanton was there, sitting in a chair with the police shotgun in his hands. His right leg was torn up, but he hardly paid attention to the blood that pumped up out of it. I turned to ask Wilton to stop the bleeding, but she was nowhere in sight.

After a minute or two, we had fought them off. There was a lull in the attacks and I wondered what the next wave would be like. Vance reloaded with shaking fingers. “We can’t hold everything, there are less than twenty of us left,” he told me.

“I know.”

“Let’s pull back out of here and just cover the dentists place.”

“So much for all that fencing we built out there.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, “we are already retreating to our last stronghold.”

“Okay, I’ll cover the door, you get Jimmy up and help him into the back.”

“What about that?” Vance nodded his head toward the lantern on the table. I looked at the lantern, still lying untouched on the kids table with my coat draped over it. There was only the faintest glow coming from under my coat, we had tucked it down as tightly as we could without touching the thing.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s what she is after. Maybe she’ll just take it and go.”

“Or maybe she will use it to finish us off,” said Jimmy Vanton, talking for the first time. We looked at him. He had both hands on his legs and the bleeding had slowed. “Look, I know no one wants to touch it. I’ll carry it, and you guys get me up and help me walk.”

“I’ll carry it,” said Holly quietly. She was staring at the thing on the table. I realized she was probably right, she could do it and leave the rest of us to fight and help Jimmy.

There was a new round of gunfire from the back of the center. It was terrible to listen to, not knowing if everyone back there was dying or just firing out a window at something they thought they saw. I wanted to get all of us together. I wanted to have Monika in my sight at all times.

Then, outside, we heard the fence go down with a wild rattling, snapping sound. There was crashing in the parking lot. Vance and I exchanged glances. We had heard these types of sounds before. Something big was coming.

Jimmy struggled up. “I can carry it! I can do more than a little girl, anyway.”

Vance put an arm out and kept him from toppling over. He clutched his shotgun with one hand and the table with the other.

The whole building shook then. The huge something that was dragging the fence with it had impacted with the building and a section of the wall in the optometrists section caved in. Then the roof buckled over our heads and a hole opened up. There were screams in my ears, and a huge hand reached down through the hole in the ceiling and lifted up a section of it. Acoustical tiles fell in chunks and roofing pelted us. We all just froze and cringed, ducking down, not knowing for a second what to do. Then Vance and Jimmy fired at the hand as it came back down, covered in black twisted bark. One finger splintered and broke off, and then the tree hand came for Jimmy. He tried to duck, to hobble away, but he couldn’t move fast enough. The hand lifted him up and pulled him, screaming, up into the night sky. He flopped and writhed and grabbed onto the sides of the hole. His shotgun boomed once, and then it was over. Blood and bits of roofing rained down when the hand wrenched him, still gripping his shotgun, through the too small opening.

More shapes were humping in through the front door and the building shivered under more impacts. I could see in an instant there was more than one tree out there, I envisioned them smashing away at the building.

We ran then, we simply forgot about the lantern and our job of holding the doorway and we even forgot about Jimmy Vanton, who was as good as dead anyway. We just ran down the halls, Vance and Holly and I.

Chunks of the building were being torn away now, the trees were wading into the lobby like giants. Snake-like roots lashed the old chairs and smashed through the aquarium. Dried-up fish and colored gravel splattered the floor.

Behind us, most terrible of all, scintillating light burst in a myriad of colors. Someone or something had uncovered the lantern.

“What’s happening?” Mrs. Hatchell had my shirt in her hands and she had tears in her eyes.

My left hand reached up and snatched her hands away. A look of shock and pain came into her face. My warped hand must have squeezed her too hard.

“You’re crushing my wrists,” she said.

“Gannon, stop,” said Monika, touching my arm. I twitched away from her touch, but then allowed it.

“Jimmy Vanton is dead,” I told them. “And we’ve lost the lobby and the lantern.”

“The Hag has it,” said Vance.

“Maybe she’ll go away now,” said Nelson hopefully.

“Or she’ll make more things to finish us,” returned Vance.

Mrs. Hatchell rubbed her wrists and glared at me. “What about the trees?”

“Let’s get the buckets and gasoline set up again,” suggested Vance.

“We’ll burn ourselves up,” said Holly, and everyone paused, realizing she was probably right. The trees were not out in a parking lot now, but digging right into the building. If we threw gasoline on these walls and set them ablaze, we might kill a tree, but we had no way out ourselves.

We decided to barricade the hallways as best we could with furniture and equipment. I threw computers and monitors and expensive medical lab equipment in a heap on the floor and piled it up. I would have traded it all for a stack of sandbags now.

The Preacher soon joined us from the backdoor. They had lost that entrance as well. We had retreated to our inner stronghold and there was no way out now. I recalled something I’d read about recordings of the crews in black boxes on lost aircraft, that crews going down in aircraft never seemed to completely understand they were dying, never really believed it, not until the very last second. Unlike in movies, they didn’t weep and scream incoherently, but instead fought the situation, battled professionally until the end with whatever they had, trying everything. And always, they had hope, even though they were doomed. Perhaps denial was one of our most useful survival traits. We weren’t as good as dead, we didn’t accept our doom, the thought never even occurred to us. We simply worked hard to solve the problems at hand.

“She’s got what she came for, but she’s still coming,” hissed Mrs. Hatchell to no one in particular. “Why?”

No one answered her.

After another minute or so of scrambled activity, the roof caved in. At least, that’s what I thought at first. What really happened was the floor collapsed under the fantastic weight of the living trees, taking down the walls and a good part of the roof with it. Suddenly, our corridor that had been ten feet wide or so was half that, or less. The building parted with a vast groaning, tearing noise. It sounded like a freight train roaring by inches away from your head. We dove away from it, but not everyone went in the right direction. Carlene Mitts was standing against the wrong wall at the wrong time. She vanished down into the basement along with twenty tons of brick, furniture, roofing and thrashing trees. It was only chance, I suppose, that she had handed her baby over to Monika before it happened. Or maybe, somehow, she had known. Maybe some changed, newly sensitive part of her mind had told her to do it. We’ll never know the truth, but the baby girl lived.

The oddest thing, after the air cleared, was the feeling of suddenly being outside. A moment before we had been in the deepest inner recesses of the building we had made our home in for weeks and then, we were out under the open skies. Everyone was screaming. My own throat was raw, but that could have been the dust. The storm had settled down to a steady rain of fat cold drops. It cleared the dust quickly and turned the floor into a dark gray mud of crumbled cement and plaster. Cold air blew down from the dark sky and occasional red flashes of unnatural lightning still flickered high above us. I looked up and drank in a heavy breath of night air. For all the terror in my heart, the air still tasted fresh and good.