Sara Reinke - Backwoods

Moving in unison, they stepped through the doorway. Dani had thumbed off the safety and chambered a fresh round in the M16. She held it drawn to her face now, her head tilted slightly as she lined up her aim with practiced skill and ease. Andrew panned the light across the interior, surprised and caught off guard to find no screamers inside.

There were, however, definite signs of a struggle. Andrew could see dimpled impressions left in the drywall, places where something had hit the walls hard enough to crack the surface. Some of the ceiling tiles overhead lay lopsided, the fluorescent light fixture covers dangling from their hinges. Suzette’s cardboard box of supplies had been overturned and scattered, the packages of crackers stomped on and shredded, crumbs strewn everywhere like a dusting of snow. Cans of peas and green beans had rolled in all directions, their aluminum lids winking in the Maglite’s beam as it swept past them. Something else glittered weakly in the flashlight’s glow; dark and smeared on the floor, it glistened like wet paint that had been tracked in on a boot heel.

Not paint, Andrew thought. Blood.

“Oh, God,” Dani whispered as the flashlight found what was left of Suzette. Sprawled in a heap in the corner of the room, she looked like a rag doll that had been tossed tempestuously about by a toddler on a rampage. The front of her blouse was covered in blood, her khaki slacks were splattered with it in a grisly patchwork. Her stomach had been torn open. The meat of her entrails lay in a glistening, bloody heap against her groin, drooping in fleshy coils to the floor.

Slinging the rifle over her shoulder, Dani rushed forward, dropping to her knees beside Suzette.

“Dani,” Andrew began in protest, sweeping the light one last, anxious time around the breadth of the room. Where’d they go? he thought. If the screamers had attacked Suzette, they’d been quick about it and even quicker to disperse, which made no sense because they would’ve had no reason. So where are they, then? Why did they leave?

“She’s still alive,” Dani exclaimed. She’d felt along Suzette’s neck for a pulse and apparently had found one. Turning to Andrew now, her voice urgent, she said, “Bring the light over here. She’s still alive!”

Even as he crossed the room to squat beside Suzette, Dani was on the move again, hurrying toward the desk, the heap of blankets Suzette had piled beneath in a makeshift pallet. “We can use one of these to make a litter,” she said, pulling a sheet loose, flapping it between her hands to shake off cracker crumbs.

At this sound, sharp and smart, Suzette’s eyelids fluttered open. Andrew could see her nose had been broken and was now a swollen and misshapen lump, the nostrils crusted with blood. Her lips were likewise battered and bloodied, and a narrow laceration zig-zagged down the side of her face, nearly from her hairline to her chin. Her gaze focused blearily on Andrew and when she gasped, a ragged exhalation of air, blood peppered up from her lips to spatter her chin.

“It’s alright,” Andrew said, reaching instinctively for her hand. Their last encounter had been anything but friendly, but all at once that didn’t matter. She was clearly in pain. The glazed look in her eyes reminded him powerfully, poignantly of his sister, Beth’s; an injured rabbit caught in a trap that has struggled to the point where it had nearly torn, chewed or clawed its tethered leg loose to free itself.

“It’s going to be okay, Suzette,” he whispered.

Her eyes rolled helplessly from him toward Dani, then up at the ceiling, then down again. She croaked something, a gurgling sound he couldn’t make out.

“Don’t try to talk,” he soothed.

She seized the front of his shirt with surprising strength and he gasped in surprise as she pulled him toward her. “Run,” she hissed.

With a loud BANG that Andrew mistook at first for gunfire, the ceiling panel almost directly above his head came crashing down. He caught a blur of motion, felt thrumming in the floor beneath him as something heavy and large sprang down from the narrow open overhead, landing in front of him.

“Jesus!” he screamed. That was all he had time for, because before he could even scuttle backwards or raise his pistol in feeble self-defense, the creature—a screamer, one of the deformed, mutated members of Alpha squadron—seized him roughly by the throat, hauling him abruptly off his feet, hoisting him into the air.

It was hideous, its face and form a twisted, gnarled mess of varicose veins, bulging nodules and pus-filled cysts. Tumors had covered one of its eyes with stark red lumps and growths, while the other bulged from its socket as if shoved out from behind. Its lips wrinkled back and the bulbous globe of its protruding eye locked on Andrew’s face.

“Andrew!” Dani cried as the screamer threw him the length of the room, sending him smashing into the far wall, leaving a crumpled depression in the plaster. The force of the impact knocked the wind from him and he collapsed in a heap on the floor, his ears ringing, his mind swimming.

Dani screamed again as with an overlapping series of crashes and thuds, more screamers pounced from hidden alcoves in the ceiling. They had all been hiding in the claustrophobically small channel between the drop tiles and original ceiling, clinging to conduits, I-beams and whatever else had been on hand to support them.

“Oh, my God,” Dani shrieked, then she fired the M16, sending a rapid-fire series of rounds scattering into the clustered screamers. The report was deafening, and with each brutal impact, the screamers danced wildly, jerking and writhing, staggering backwards, falling over.

“Shoot them in the hearts,” Andrew tried to tell her, but even if he hadn’t still been gasping vainly to catch his breath, he doubted she’d have heard him over the furious ratta-tat-TAT of automatic gunfire. Now he understood why Moore had told him this when they’d encountered the first creature inside the lab. The regenerative capabilities caused by his synthetic virus meant anything less than an instantaneously lethal wound would only slow them down. And probably piss them off.

The gunshots ceased, the room fading to silence, a lingering haze of smoke and drywall dust hanging in the air. The screamers all lay sprawled on the floor, tangled together, a mass of mostly indiscernible appendages that had once been arms and legs, feet and hands.

“What are they?” Dani whispered. “What the hell are those things?”

That was right about the time one of the screamers began to move, recovering from this initial attack. A pair of spindly, jointed limbs rose from the heap of bodies, each as big around as Andrew’s forearm and longer than one of Andrew’s legs, grotesquely oversized and insectile.

When the screamer lifted the remains of its torso up between these two hideously peculiar limbs, Andrew realized they were some of its ribs, that somehow several of the lower bones in its ribcage had fused together, then grown out from its torso in crude protuberances. Between these and its arms—which had likewise split along fault lines from the vertexes of its thumbs clear to its elbows, separating the hands and the parallel bones of its forearms into separate limbs—the screamer balanced itself, spider-like.

Unlike O’Malley or any of the others Andrew had seen to date, this screamer’s head remained relatively untouched by the tumor-like growths. Its mouth looks swollen, its eyes bulging out as the brain matter behind and beneath grew out of control, swelling inside its skull cavity, but its features still looked human, a contrast to its monstrously deformed body that made it somehow even more grotesque.