Brian Keene: Entombed

“Pete? Are you there?” She sighed, and then her voice grew louder. “Oh, screw this. I’m being silly. He’s probably still upstairs. Or dead.”

A severe cramp shot through my calf. I bit my lip to keep from crying out, but Nicole must have heard my intake of breath, because she gasped and took a step backward.

“Pete? Is that you? Did you hear what I—”

“Nicole?” Another pair of legs appeared in the doorway. I couldn’t see their owner, but I knew that it was Damonte by the sound of his voice. “Anybody in there?”

She hesitated before answering. “No, I thought I heard something, but it’s empty.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s up with the can?”

“I’ve got a cigarette lighter,” Nicole said. “If I came across Pete, and he wouldn’t listen to reason, then I figured I could make a blowtorch out of it.”

“How do you do that?”

“Didn’t you ever do that as a kid?”

“Hell, no. My mother would have beat my ass. How does it work?”

“It’s easy. You just press down on the nozzle and hold the flame into the stream. You just have to be careful not to get the lighter too close to the can or it will blow back on you.”

Damonte grunted in appreciation. “Check you out. You’ve gone all Rambo and shit.”

“Well, we’ve got to make due, don’t we? It’s not like we have any guns.”

“No, I guess it isn’t. I wish to hell we did. I’d feel a lot better with a gun in my hand, given what’s going on. Speaking of which, nobody has come down from upstairs yet. I set a trap around the stairwell door just now. Put some glass bottles and aluminum cans and stuff around the door. If he comes through, we’ll hear him. I locked the door, too, so he’ll have to make even more noise if he tries to get in.”

“Do you think the others are dead?”

“The one’s upstairs? I don’t know. Like I said, they’re not back yet. Maybe they’ve got him cornered and are waiting him out. Maybe they captured him and are just taking their time coming back. Or maybe… what you said. In any case, I figure better safe than sorry. I locked the incinerator door, too. Just in case Pete tries to come down that way. I figured that makes more sense than having Phillips and I walk around down here, waiting for Pete to show.”

“Yeah,” Nicole said, “that didn’t make a lot of sense. And Chuck didn’t seem too happy when I told him so.”

“Speaking of which, Chuck told me to tell you that he wants you to go back to the dining room. He’s already in there. Emma is in there with him.”

“What about Susan?”

“She’s hiding out in one of the dorm rooms. He sent Phillips to find her and bring her back to the dining room, too. Chuck wants all three of you in there with him.”

“I don’t care what Chuck wants. You see what’s happening here, don’t you, Damonte? We’re all going crazy—Chuck worst of all. I know exactly why he wants us to stay in there with him.”

“Yeah, well I ain’t too crazy about it, either. Like I said, he wants me and Phillips to stay out here and patrol the hallways, waiting for Pete to show up. How do you think I feel about that?”

“Not too good, I guess.”

“You’re damned straight I don’t. That’s why I locked the doors and set the traps. I’d rather be in the cafeteria with you all, truth be told. You saw what Pete did to Drew and Dave. That shit was vicious. It made your little blowtorch there seem like a toy.”

“Then why stay out here? Why not just ignore what Chuck tells you?”

“Because I’m more scared of Chuck than I am of Pete. So are you.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yeah, Nicole. You are. Have you gotten a good look in his eyes? You’re right—what you said earlier. Chuck is crazy. He’s not playing around here. That’s why I’m going along with things. Better not to piss him off. And besides…”

His voice trailed off. I watched Nicole walk toward him.

“Besides what?” she prompted.

“Well… I was going to say that even though he’s crazy, Chuck is still right. I don’t like it, but he’s right about eating Pete. We’re out of food. We’re starving to death. We’ve got to do something .”

“Yeah, but murder?”

“You voted for it, too, Nicole.”

“Maybe so, but it doesn’t even matter now. Chuck said we’ll… he said that we can start with Drew, Dave and Krantz. And any of the others Pete might have killed. That’s enough. Nobody else has to die today. If we can preserve them, that’s enough to last us for months, as long as we ration the… meat… carefully. We don’t have to keep up the hunt.”

“Chuck doesn’t agree. And to be honest, after seeing what Pete has done, I’m inclined to agree with him. Like I said, you voted for this, too. I’m thinking we made the right decision, choosing Pete the way we did. He’s a fucking serial killer.”

They stepped out into the hallway and Nicole closed the door behind them, muffling their voices. My temples throbbed and a muscle in my jaw twitched. I sat there until their footsteps had faded, and then I eased myself out from under the table, grimacing at the pain in my joints and muscles as I stood up again.

Damonte’s final words echoed in my head. A serial killer? Is that what I was? Was that what I’d become? The post-apocalyptic wasteland’s version of Ted Bundy or The Exit or Jeffrey Dahmer? Me? That was ridiculous. I mean, sure, I’d killed some people. In truth, I’d killed a lot of people. A lot. And those things weighed on my conscious the moment I allowed myself to slow down and think about it. The guilt crushed me, just like the regrets I felt over Alyssa and Hannah. But they’d left me no choice. Why couldn’t they see that it had been in self-defense? Nicole was seeing it now. Why couldn’t Damonte and the rest? I didn’t want to kill anybody, but they’d left me no other option. If any one of them had been in my shoes, even for a moment, they’d have reacted in the same manner. None of them would have just offered themselves up as a sacrificial lamb. None of us were Jesus. We weren’t going to offer up our flesh and our blood for the others to partake in, thus granting them life via our death.

A line from Scarface ran through my head—Al Pacino asking, “Who’s the bad guy?” Well, it wasn’t me. I wasn’t the bad guy in this situation. Neither were the zombies, for that matter. The zombies were nothing more than window dressing. Background noise—a catalyst that got us to this point. No, the zombies didn’t matter. The real bad guys were my fellow survivors. Chuck and his people , as he’d called them. They were the real villains.

The corridor was silent, and I was pretty sure that the coast was finally clear. As I crept toward the door, I patted my back pockets to reassure myself that my weapons were still there. The razor knife was safely tucked away, but the screwdriver was missing. I stopped and did a quick search of the library, looking under the table and carefully scanning the floor, but I couldn’t find the screwdriver anywhere. I remembered picking it up in the stairwell. I’d used it to open the door. Where the hell was it now? I panicked. What if I had dropped it out in the hallway? What if Damonte and Nicole had discovered it there, and knew all along that I’d been hiding nearby? Could their entire conversation have been nothing more than an act? Could Nicole’s seemingly heartfelt-apology have just been a charade, after all—an attempt to lure me out of hiding so that they could finish the job?

“Paranoia will destroy ya,” I muttered.

It didn’t matter. I still had the razor knife and the pocketknife, so it wasn’t like I was totally defenseless. As I turned toward the door again, I glanced at the newspaper racks. On a whim, I walked over to them and grabbed one of the newspaper holders. It looked just like a wooden sword, and when I gave it a few experimental swings through the air, it felt very satisfying. I thought about snapping the tip and turning it into a spear, like I’d done with the broom handle, but decided that I liked it better this way. If I cracked somebody in the head with it, I’d certainly do some damage to them. I was confident that the wood was solid enough to break bones without the rod splintering or snapping. A memory surfaced from when I was a kid—summers spent roaming around in the little strip of woods behind my house, swinging sticks and branches like they were lightsabers. I’d liked the feeling back then, and I liked it even more now. It was comforting. Clutching the newspaper rod in my hand gave me an overwhelming sense of power, as if I were a marauding barbarian making my way through some subterranean labyrinth in search of a princess.