J. Mitchell - Midnight City

It came again, a long, sustained vibration that ran down its length.

It was like… someone scratching. On the other side of their room. As if someone had dug in their fingers and clawed slowly from top to bottom.

The sound implied movement… and it also implied thought and intelligence.

Max dropped the taffy and stood up. He growled low in his throat, the hair on his back rising.

“Mira…,” Zoey said, and she pulled the girl close.

Something was in the next room from them, in the dark. And whatever it was, it was waking up.

HOLT STARED AT THE scratch marks up and down the wall in front of him. Outside, the sunlight was completely gone. It was night, and inside the sunken drugstore everything was pitch black.

He could see only what his dim flashlight showed him, and that wasn’t much. As the darkness pressed in on him, Holt realized how much of it lay between him and the hole in the roof.

The water stirred beneath him.

Holt shone his light downward. The blackish liquid below stirred in circular waves, rolling back and forth, as if something had just moved through it.

Or in it.

A small splash, below and to the right. His flashlight darted over, but again, there was nothing. Only shadows and black water.

Something was in the dark with him. He had a sudden, intense desire to make himself scarce.

He reached for one of the radios and quickly grabbed it. There wasn’t time to get any more than that; he’d stayed too long already. In his greed, he’d ignored survival, had put himself at risk. He felt anger rising up, but pushed it back. This wasn’t the time.

Holt swung up to the rafter, made ready to start jumping back… and then stopped, realizing he was missing something.

Batteries. For the radio.

He looked back down to the shelves behind the register. The batteries lay on the same shelf, just below him.

More splashing… but now from several directions. The shadows pulsed and writhed under him, and this time when he shone his light down, he caught the briefest glimpse of something tall and dark as it darted behind one of the shelves.

Holt jolted in fright.

The blue pack stuffed with the treasure fell from his hand, tumbled down, hit the register, and slid across the counter.

Holt stared down at it. It wasn’t completely out of reach—he could jump down to the counter, it would probably hold him. Then he could—

More stirring of water, now all around him. He saw dark shapes rising slowly up and out of the murk, all throughout the store. If he didn’t leave now, Holt had a feeling he wouldn’t leave at all. The pack wasn’t worth it.

“Typical…,” he said in frustration, staring down at the pack below him.

But it didn’t have to be a total loss.

Holt rolled back over the edge of the rusty ceiling rafter, hanging by his knees. He reached for a pack of batteries and grabbed it…

…just as a human-shaped black shadow lunged at him from the dark, hissing and stammering in some crazed language.

Holt flinched, flexed his legs, and swung back onto the rafter. The shadow just missed him and slammed into the store’s wall, sending the radios and batteries flying everywhere.

The flashlight fell from Holt’s mouth, plummeting into the water. Everything went dark.

But Holt didn’t have time to care. More of the black shapes were moving below him, rising from the water, dozens and dozens of them.

He had to leave. Now.

He shoved the batteries and radio into his main pack and leapt from one rafter to the next as fast as he could.

The things below him hissed and gurgled their strange sounds, moving after him.

Ahead of Holt was the rafter he’d first landed on, and above it the hole back to the roof. And two of the things, whatever they were, were crawling and scratching up onto it.

Without the flashlight, they were just dirty black shadows, but he didn’t need to see them to know they wanted him dead.

Holt leapt for the last rafter, landed, and drew his pistol, a Beretta 9, to fire off three rapid shots.

The first shadow took all three, spun crazily, fell, and crashed into the shelves below.

Holt aimed at the second thing crawling toward him, but it was too late.

It leapt on him, and the scent of it washed over Holt. He gagged at the powerful combination of rotted plants and meat, oil, sweat, and whatever else made up the black water below.

But it wasn’t the thing’s smell, as bad as it was, that shocked Holt. Or even the sight of its leathery, blackened, crazed human face, its mouth missing half its teeth. It was its eyes, set deep back into its skull.

They were a solid white. The opposite of the black eyes of the Succumbed.

The figure’s hand, its fingernails overgrown and curling, reached for Holt’s throat.

Holt rammed his head right into the thing’s face.

It hissed and wailed, stumbled off him. Holt kicked it backwards as hard as he could. The thing fell and crashed into two more of the dark, jittering shadows below.

Holt caught his breath, got to his knees. More of the shapes were climbing up the wall to get to him. The entire floor was crawling with them now. They’d been hiding in the water the whole time. The image of the white eyes was burned into his mind.

It can’t be….

But Holt knew it was. Holt knew now what was in the water with him, knew what had made this entire ruined city its home, knew the reason why no one who entered the Drowning Plains ever returned.

He frantically leapt upward, grabbed the edge of the roof through the hole, and pulled himself out. He had to reach the others fast, had to get them out of here. Assuming they weren’t already dead…

MIRA STARED, WIDE EYED, at the wall. The scratching had intensified. It wasn’t just louder; it seemed like it was coming from more than one place.

More scratching, this time from the opposite wall.

Mira’s breath caught in her throat. It was on both sides of them now.

“Mira…” Zoey, terrified, tried to push even farther into her grasp.

Mira had to get them out of here fast. “Zoey, sweetheart, let go for a second,” she said, pushing her off. “I’m going to open the window. When I do—”

The scratching sounds again, from a new place. The door to the room.

Zoey hugged her leg. Max barked loud and aggressive, staring at the door, ready to rush whatever came through. The sound echoed through the room, and Mira grimaced. If these things didn’t know they were here before, they knew now.

Mira got to her feet, reached for the window, gripped it, and yanked upward.

It moved maybe an inch… then jammed.

“Oh, you gotta be kidding,” Mira mumbled.

Why would it open from the outside and not now? She pulled up on the window as hard as she could. It rocked up, moved another inch, but no more. It felt even more tightly wedged than before.

The door handle at the other end of the room began to rattle. Something was trying to open it. The door was locked, but who knew what age had done to the dead bolt; it was probably ready to fall apart.

Mira looked around for anything she could break the glass with. An old armchair sat in pieces in front of a crumbling desk. She grabbed the biggest piece she could find and spun back around.

“Stay back,” she warned Zoey, swinging the chair leg into the window.

It shattered and sprayed glass everywhere. She used the chair to clear out the rest of the windowpane. Broken glass covered the floor like crushed ice.

Not the most elegant solution, but—

Zoey screamed as a dark shape appeared in the window. Mira raised the chair in defense.

It was Holt.

Mira sighed in relief. “Something’s—,” she started desperately.