Sara Reinke - Backwoods

“Oh, my, God,” Dani whispered with a breathless, stunned sort of horror, the barrel of the M16 drooping toward the floor. “Langley?”

PFC Grant Langley—or what was left of him, anyway—scrabbled around, crab-like and swift, at the sound of his name. His distended eyes swung to lock on Dani’s face and the thin seam of his mouth cut wide, his lips pulling back as he grinned at her, gleeful and deranged.

“ Santoro,” he said, although his voice no longer sounded even remotely human, more a lisping, scraping sound, like fingernails against a chalkboard or a knife blade against a whetting stone.

The places where Dani’s bullets had struck Langley were healing, new tumors bubbling out like heated air bubbles from a lava bed, regenerated flesh forming to fill in the crater-like points of impact where he’d been shot.

The other screamers began to stir and rise all around Langley. The one that had attacked Andrew rose clumsily to its feet, propped on the oversized, gnarled twists of its hands like a silverback gorilla. One of Dani’s rounds had caught it in the head and glistening, spongy tissue burbled out like the innards of a rotten melon spewing from a fissure.

Dani moaned. “Duvall?” she whispered to this one, shrinking back. Her stricken, horrified gaze panned from screamer to screamer, staring past the tumors and disfigurements, finding enough familiarity in each to recognize them all. “Parker?”

Another had been shot in the neck, unleashing a gory rush of blood from its punctured carotid artery. If that wound hadn’t spontaneously healed, then the blood flow had at least been rerouted by the same regenerative abilities, as new blood vessels, each as thick as Andrew’s forefinger, began to grow, vine-like, to encircle its throat, to reach up toward its head in rapidly spreading tendrils and capillaries.

“Madison?” Dani moaned. “Oh, God, what’s happened to you?”

“Shoot them,” Andrew screamed.

“What?” she stared at him, stricken, shaking her head. She looked back at what was left of Alpha squadron as they shambled toward her, backing her further and further across the room. “No, no, I can’t do that, I can’t.”

“Dani, shoot them,” Andrew screamed again, stumbling to his feet, grimacing at a sharp, grinding pain that lanced through his lower back at the movement.

“I can’t!” she screamed back, her voice strained and hoarse. She’d retreated into a wall and pressed herself there. To Andrew’s horrified dismay, the M16 tumbled from her hands, clattering to the floor by her feet. “I know them.”

“ Santoro,” Langley hissed again, scuttling forward, swallowing the distance between them in less than a second.

“What happened to you?” Dani whispered. “They told us you got sick. All of you…you were sick.” Her voice cut short in a frightened cry as one of his forked, deformed hands shot forward, its long, spindly fingers splayed wide to frame her face.

“ Santoro.” He continued to smile at her, his grin stretching wider and wider until the skin of his cheeks began to split with the strain, ripping open with a sickening sound, like old parchment tearing along moldering seams.

“Oh, God,” Dani moaned.

The flesh under Langley’s chin also split as his neck began to elongate, stretching like molten taffy being pulled to unnatural, elastic proportions. Further and further, his neck stretched, the muscles and ligaments beneath pulling taut, new blood vessels growing in a bizarre, interlocking latticework, until Langley’s head bobbed at least three feet above his shoulders.

“ Santoro,” he said again, his cheeks rived wide enough so that when he opened his mouth, his bottom jaw seemed to come completely unhinged, dropping unnaturally, grotesquely wide. She screamed at this, then screamed again as what looked like a pair of chelicerae, the massive fang structures of a spider or crab, suddenly protruded from beneath his upper lip, extending from where he’d carried them retracted and tucked against his upper palate. This was apparently what had happened to his front teeth and gums, how Moore’s retrovirus had transformed them into something horrific, hideous and new.

“Dani!” With a desperate cry, Andrew lunged at Langley, plowing into him from the side, trying to knock him away. Instead, Langley pivoted to greet him, keeping Dani pinned to the wall with one hand and reaching out, catching Andrew with surprising speed and force with the tines of the other. Those twin spikes locked beneath Andrew’s throat, abruptly snuffing his airflow and he choked vainly for breath, thrashing as Langley hoisted him off his feet, leaving him to struggle in mid-air.

“Andrew!” Dani wailed.

“ Andrew,” Langley echoed, those grotesque pedipalps waggling. Arching his back with a sickening series of pops as his vertebrae snapped into new, unnatural configurations, Langley exposed his stomach, bowing it out so that when he dragged the hooked tip of one of his mutated ribs to gouge open his navel, both Dani and Andrew had clear and unobstructed views.

“Dani. . . run,” Andrew gagged as Langley eviscerated himself, slicing open a thin seam in his gut that split wide with a moist, squelching sound, letting a tumble of intestines suddenly protrude. Dani screamed, her voice ripping up shrill octaves as the slick coils of entrails suddenly began twitching and moving of their own accord. Like a nest of snakes uncovered, they began to writhe and wriggle, sliding free in thick, fingerlike projections that reached out from Langley’s belly to touch her, grope at her.

“Dani,” Andrew croaked. “For… for God’s sake…”

His voice cut short as Langley threw him across the room, sending him crashing into the wall, bouncing off the desk and slamming face-down against the floor. Although he didn’t black out from the impact, he hit hard enough for his mind to slip into a momentary murkiness, for his eyes to droop closed and remain that way, at least until Dani’s next shrill, piercing shriek ripped him soundly from the edge of that unconscious oblivion.

The nasty tendrils of Langley’s intestines had encircled her arms, heading for her shoulders. She struggled wildly, screaming like a fire bell. Andrew remembered the video of Langley and the camel spider, the sadistic glee he’d taken in tormenting it.

He’s toying with her, Andrew thought, gritting his teeth against a swell of dizziness as he shoved his hands beneath him and struggled to sit up. He’d jostled a broom that had been left propped against the desk in his fall, and when it toppled, the handle barked him in the head.

“Leave…her alone,” he seethed at Langley, knocking the broom aside. It was flimsy and cheap with plastic bristles and a lightweight, hollow aluminum shaft. It was nothing he could use as a weapon, which he was about to need in short measure, he realized, as the other screamers broke away from their tight circumference around Langley and Dani and started shambling toward him.

Shit, he thought, sitting up, scrambling back toward the desk. He glanced around wildly, looking for his pistol, which he’d lost in the initial screamer’s attack. Not that it would do him much good, he suspected. The screamers were too badly infected with Moore’s virus. Its regenerative properties were so accelerated now, they were nearly instantaneous, and he doubted even a wound to the heart would be lethal anymore. He didn’t see the gun, but did spy something else, a rumpled package of Marlboro Lights among the blankets beneath the desk, Suzette’s chrome-encased Zippo lighter beside it.

He grabbed the broom in one hand, Suzette’s fallen lighter in the other. His fingers were shaking, so much so, he had to tuck the broom beneath his arm and use both hands to flip back the lid of the Zippo and paw at the flint wheel. It took him three tries, each one more desperate and harried than the last, before he got it to light, and he whipped the end of the broom around, shoving the flame beneath the angled edge of the grey plastic bristles.