Cassie Alexander - Deadshifted

The freight elevator doors opened, and I jogged down the hallway to the morgue—I knew I was going the right way from all the flower petals people moving bodies had tracked back to the elevator doorway. If I went past the morgue, hopefully I’d run into them—there was no way transferring so many people over would be a quick process.

The sound of gunfire stopped me in my tracks.

I wanted to pretend I hadn’t heard it. I paused, trying to convince myself that it’d been some weird engine noise—but no, another staccato burst and panicked shouting, coming my way—fast.

Without thinking, I ducked into the morgue. Who would look for survivors in here? And maybe I could get some answers. I tapped the nearest body with my shoe.

“Shadows—what’s happening?”

The body didn’t answer me.

“I know you’re in there.” The sound of screaming stopped, but the gunfire didn’t. I looked furtively at the doors, and they burst open. I bit back a scream and dropped to the floor, before I saw that it was Rory.

“You!” he said, recognizing me.

“What’s going on out there?”

He looked around the room, realizing where he was, and he froze, as still as all the other occupants. “Rory—get away from the window.” When he didn’t move, I ran for him and pulled him aside. “What’s happening?”

He blinked and shook his head and didn’t stop shaking it while he talked. “Why did I come here? Did I want to die with them?”

I realized his parents were in here. “No.” I grabbed his nearer shoulder with my good hand and looked frantically around the room. “Shadows—” It was too bright in here with the lights on but I knew there were pools of darkness inside each half-opened mouth. The sound of gunfire was getting closer. “I know you can hear me. Can you hide us from this?”

I didn’t see which corpse they were speaking from this time, but I heard their voice, gravelly and low. “Turn off the light and cover yourself.”

With the nearing gunfire, there wasn’t much time. I grabbed up a sheet from the ground, stained with frozen everything, put Rory in the corner of the room where I could find him, and put the sheet around his shoulders like a cape. Then I raced back to swat the light switch down, and ran as carefully as I could in the dark back to his side. I pulled the sheet up over both us, like we were children hiding from monsters beneath our own bed.

There came the sound of scrabbling on the outside of the sheet, and then a weight pressing down around us, like when my cat Minnie joined me on the bed at night—if Minnie had had a hundred more legs and they all ended in claws.

“Not him, not him, just you,” the Shadows said.

“Kick him out,” a voice suggested.

“Let him die,” said another one.

“What?” Rory said. I clapped a hand over his mouth, and wrapped my slinged arm around him.

“Stop scaring him!” I hissed. “Haven’t you fed enough?”

“Never,” they whispered back.

Rory started to wrestle me, and whapped his head back, catching me in the eye. I let him go involuntarily. “What the—” he began.

“Stop it! They can’t hurt you!” It was a total lie, but the guns were getting closer, and it was too easy to imagine each short burst extinguishing a life. “Just calm down!”

The thing atop the sheet curled up on us like an icy snake, and Rory’s breathing sounded like a runaway train in my ear. “Hold your breath,” I whispered just as the doors to the morgue swung open. I could see a flashlight beam swirl around the room.

I’m not sure what the Shadows showed instead of us, but it worked—either that, or whoever held the flashlight didn’t want to spend long in a room where the occupants were clearly dead.

“Clear!” said an unfamiliar male voice. The light from the hallway and the flashlight beam disappeared, and the sound of tromping continued on outside. The weight on top of us scrabbled off, melting away, and Rory and I were alone in the dark.

“What was that?” Rory whispered, his voice breaking in panic.

“I’ll explain in a bit, but I need to know what’s going on first. What happened with the rescue ship?”

“C—can we turn on the light?”

“That’s probably not wise,” answered the Shadows from beneath us.

“Shush. Please. Although thank you,” I told them, and then snapped my fingers for attention in front of Rory, even though I couldn’t see his face in the dark. “What went on?”

“They—they—” it took him a moment to get himself under control, but then the words poured out like water. “The rescue ship sent a smaller boat over, and we opened the doors up for it to dock—and some of the people started trying to throw themselves overboard. Even the weak ones still wanted to get into the water. We tried to hold them back, but we couldn’t. They were too strong. One fell in, and we put a spotlight on him, but we couldn’t pull him out—he was too far away. And then this thing, I swear I saw this thing crawl out of his mouth, like a giant worm. The size of my arm.” He grabbed hold of me in the dark for strength. “I don’t have one of those inside of me, do I?”

“Of course not,” I said—although I didn’t know for sure. “Where did the people with guns come from?”

“The medical boat. When their transfer boat docked, twenty men got off with guns. They were never here to help us, were they,” he said, not actually asking a question. “Is that what happened to my parents? Worms?” His voice broke at the thought.

I couldn’t lie to him twice. “I honestly don’t know, Rory.” There wasn’t any time to comfort him, so I just pressed on. “Where’s Raluca?”

“She got shot.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I just saw her fall down.”

I had to grit my teeth to stop from groaning, and I spoke more slowly. “Focus, Rory. Where’d she fall?”

“Back by the boats. I was a faster runner.” I heard him swallow in the dark. “I just left her behind.”

“It’s okay. Anyone would have done the same in your shoes.”

“I got scared,” he explained.

“It happens. I know.” All the video games I’d imagined he’d played, all those times he’d seen people die on screen, but the real thing was something else. It always was. “Where’s Marius?” I asked gently.

“He ran off. I think he got away. I think. I’m not sure.”

The darkness hid my frown. “Shadows—is it safe to go out in the hall?”

Their piecemeal voices spoke in eerie synchronicity. “Nowhere on this boat is safe anymore, not even for us. It rises now. He’s calling it, and it comes. It will eat all of us, dead or alive—”

“Shadows!” I reprimanded. I was already scared enough; I didn’t need to hear any more Vincent Price bullshit from them. “Are you helping us or not?”

They didn’t answer me. “Goddammit—if you brought me here the least you could do is help!” I stood and pulled the sheet off us. “Rory, I’ve got to go back out there. I need a key that Raluca has—”

“Why?” He gathered the sheet up to his chest, as if it would still hide him.

“Because I’m still searching for my friend. And because we can’t stay here. We’ll wind up like they did.” I pointed at the corpse crowd. Now that we were out from underneath the sheet, the windows set into the doors let in some ambient light, enough to see the feet of the first row.

“He can stay here. If he leaves the light off,” said the Shadows from somewhere in the dark.

“I’m coming with you.” He dropped the sheet and practically ran for the door.

We looked both ways in the hall, and then trotted back the way he’d come. I didn’t know what I’d do if we heard or saw anyone—we weren’t armed—but luckily no one met us. We opened the last set of doors, out to the tender dock. It was a wide room with garage-like doors that opened out to the sea. Emergency lighting illuminated bodies, and waves from the storm outside grasped like hands, slapping and spraying, reaching in and then sloshing back out. I was about to run across when Rory grabbed my bad shoulder.