Sara Reinke - Backwoods

Please work, he thought, inching back even as the screamers inched forward. Like Langley, they were fucking with him, playing cat-and-mouse, biding their time so they could take him at their leisure. They didn’t perceive him as a threat, and hadn’t all along, which was probably why he’d made it out of the forests alive after escaping their snare trap in the first place.

Because they let me go.

“Fuck,” he whispered, blowing lightly on the bristles, which had begun to blacken and sear with the heat of the wobbly flame. They weren’t igniting, but they were smoldering long enough to burn the plastic, to send thickening strands of pungent smoke spiraling toward the ceiling.

The screamers fanned out around him in a quickly collapsing circumference. There was the silverback looking one, he of the massive forearms and oversized tree-trunk hands that had initially attacked Andrew. Another, the one who’d been shot in the neck, now boasted a macabre mask of throbbing, pulsating blood vessels, each thick and glistening, heaped and tangled around its face and neck like mangrove roots. Another had lost most of its lower jaw in Dani’s initial gunfire; it listed loosely in a broad, irregular maw, its tongue lolling out of the gaping space in between. The last one had a crest of irregular bony protuberances framing its head, where the upper and transverse processes in its vertebrae, the prominences in its spinal bones, had grown radically and out of control, punching through its skin, fanning out like the frills of some prehistoric dinosaur.

Larry, Curly, Moe and Shemp, Andrew thought, still frantically waggling the Zippo beneath the broom bristles, even though the lighter had grown hot in his hand, the stink of searing metal growing as acrid as that of scorched plastic. Enough of the bristles had melted that the entire end of the broom now smoked, stinging his eyes, making him blink against reflexive tears.

He stepped over Suzette’s outstretched, motionless legs, sparing her a glance. Her head listed toward her shoulder, her eyes frozen in a sleepy half-blink.

Damn it, Suzette, why didn’t you come with me? he thought with a momentary pang that might have been anger with her, but more powerfully, was anger at himself. Why didn’t I make her? Why didn’t I try to make things right with her, do something, say anything so she’d have just shut up and come?

Tilting his head back, he hoisted the broom head aloft. He’d deliberately moved this way to reach one of the smoke detectors set into the ceiling. It was a photoelectric variety, and he strained to get the smoking bristles as close to it as he could. From overhead, a sharp, startling tone suddenly sounded, a woman’s voice coming from hidden speaker plates beneath the ceiling tiles.

“Warning,” she said. “Smoke detected in sector nine-seventeen. Fire suppression system to engage in ten seconds. Please observe emergency protocol and evacuation procedures at this time. This is not a drill.”

He didn’t know if the screamers understood what he was doing until that moment, but they figured it out and lunged at him, any pretense of coyness or clumsiness aside. They charged like grizzly sows defending their cubs.

“Nine seconds,” the automated woman’s voice said.

Andrew swung the broom between his hands, smashing the end of it into Shemp’s head as he charged. The broom handle snapped, the cheap aluminum splintering in two with the impact, but the blow knocked charred and smoldering bits of plastic bristles scattering like confetti and stunned the screamer enough to send it stumbling sideways.

“Eight,” said the woman. “Seven.”

The screamer with the broken jaw—Moe, as Andrew had come to think of him—darted in from Andrew’s left. As Andrew pivoted, it grabbed the broken broom shaft in its hand, trying to wrest it away from him.

He’d dropped the Zippo, but true to design, the flame had remained lit as it had fallen into some of the blankets from Suzette’s nest. These had started to smolder, sending more smoke into the air, with small flames beginning to lick at the fabric in widening tongues.

Andrew shoved against the broom handle, turning it loose as the screamer tripped over Suzette’s corpse. It floundered for a moment, its bulging eyes seeming all the more wide with surprise, then fell against the burning blankets. With a startled howl, it scrambled upright, its deformed arms and legs getting tangled in the smoldering folds. It flapped its arms, danced a mad jig and screeched as it tried to shrug its way free.

“Six,” the overhead voice droned. “Five, four.”

The mangrove-looking screamer—Curly, as seemed fairly apt—plowed into Andrew like a runaway bull, knocking him off his feet, pinning him to the ground as they landed together. Andrew reached up, but rather than grabbing it in a chokehold, felt his fingers sink between the pulsating shafts of its veins. With a disgusted yell, he clawed at them, seizing fistfuls and yanking, feeling the rubbery tissue squelch and yield beneath his fingers. Blood spurted as he ripped them open, spraying his face. As quickly as he could rip open the veins and arteries, he watched new ones grew whip and twine upward to take their place.

“Three, two,” said the automaton. “One. Fire suppression engaged.”

A claxon sounded, sharp and shrill, and then, from overhead nozzles, a thick spray of highly pressured carbon dioxide vapor suddenly plunged down. Immediately, the room was engulfed in a dense fog. Andrew managed one deep gulp for breath before it washed over him, obscuring even the screamer straddling him from view. Clamping his lips together, he held his breath.

There was no amount of regeneration in the world that could allow an organism to breathe without oxygen and in less than five seconds, the heavy blanket of gas had completely displaced all of it in the room. The screamer fell away from Andrew and he could see it if he squinted. It writhed on the floor beside him, pawing at its throat as it suffocated. Once it was off of him, Andrew acted fast, scrambling to his feet, rubbing furiously at his eyes to get the sting of blood out of them. Hands outstretched, he floundered toward the doorway until he hit the wall, and from there, he patted and pawed until he found the blue metal box mounted just inside the threshold.

It’s oxygen, Alice had told him. Little portable tanks, a mask. They’re in all the rooms. Daddy said it’s an ocean standard.

He found two cans inside, each smaller around than a beer can, but each affixed with a clear rubber face mask at the end of the tapered nozzle, with a little plastic handle for administering the flow of oxygen from can to mask. Yanking them loose, he shoved one against his mouth and nose, then depressed the trigger. He heard a soft hiss and took a breath.

How long before you smother? he thought, panicked. He spun around and stumbled forward, tucking the second canister protectively beneath his arm. He didn’t know how much oxygen one of the little cans contained. Judging by the size, he suspected not much. They’d been designed to provide enough oxygen for the wearer to get out of the building, not for any long-term survival.

The carbon dioxide nozzles had stopped spraying, and the hazy cloud began to dissipate. He could see the silhouettes of screamers sprawled on the floor, still scrabbling weakly with their deformed limbs, uttering horrible, sodden, gagging sounds. When he found Dani, he fell to his knees. Taking only intermittent breaths from his mask, then laying the can aside, he tore at the overlapping tendrils of Langley’s intestines, which he’d used to bind her in a gruesome, mummy-like fashion, nearly to her hairline. Andrew ripped them back from her face enough to find her mouth and nose, then pressed the oxygen mask against her, depressing the plastic trigger. It took two hits from the canister before her eyelids fluttered, then flew open wide. He heard her muffled cry against the rubber mask and shook his head at her.