Brian Keene: Entombed

My stomach growled again.

Muffled voices drifted from the dining room—a gruff male and an apologetic female. I couldn’t tell what was being said, but their tone defined the conversation clearly enough. The argument was punctuated by the sound of flesh striking flesh, and then the woman’s voice turned to sobs and whimpers. I ground my teeth and gripped the screwdriver so hard that my knuckles cracked. The pounding in my head grew louder. Each throb brought a fresh jolt of pain. My vision blurred again, but I kept going. That was a mistake. My knees got weak, and when I reached for the wall to support myself, I bumped my forehead against it. The wall seemed to push back. I ducked into the infirmary, intent on hiding there until this recurring dizziness had passed.

Drew, Dave and Krantz were waiting for me.

Or maybe I should say that what was left of Drew, Dave and Krantz were waiting for me.

I smelled the blood and shit from the moment I walked in the door. The room’s ventilation system kicked in, swirling the stench around in the air. It was like walking into a wall of offal. All three corpses were laid out on metal hospital beds. One of the beds had once held a battered department store mannequin that we’d used to display during bunker tours. The mannequin now lay in the corner in a tangle of artificial limbs. Whoever had tossed it there had been more gentle with the three dead men than they had with the mannequin.

The door swung shut behind me. I stood there, still dizzy, staring down at the grisly remains. All three of them were in bad shape, but Drew was the worst of all. His blackened skin was covered with bubbles and blisters which popped and oozed under the fluorescent lights. His mouth hung open. His lips had been burned off, and his tongue was a shriveled, burned thing. Even his teeth were black. They’d cracked from the heat, and looked like jagged shards jutting from his charred gums. Standing this close to them, the stench was nauseating, but that didn’t stop my mouth from watering or my stomach from growling louder. The pain in my abdomen fluctuated—dull to sharp and then back to dull, but it wasn’t going away. I clutched my gut, wincing at the sensation. I’d always wanted to get rid of the pot-belly I’d acquired during marriage. Now, at last, I had.

The dizzy spell passed again, and I was just getting ready to leave when I heard a strange rustling sound from out in the hall. I flattened myself against the wall to the immediate left of the door, and held my breath. A moment later, the door swung open, nearly bumping into me. When it swung shut again, I was staring at Damonte’s back. He held a long butcher knife in his right hand. I assumed he must have retrieved it from the kitchen. The explanation for the rustling sound I’d heard became clear when I saw what he was wearing. He’d wrapped his body in black garbage bags from the neck down, and taped them securely with gray duct tape. They made noise with each step that he took.

Damonte walked over to the tables. His back was still to me. As he stood staring down at Krantz, he sighed heavily. His shoulders slumped.

“This is some bullshit. Why do I have to be the fucking butcher?”

Even though he was muttering to himself, his voice was thick with revulsion. He raised the knife and let the blade hover over Krantz, as if unsure of where to begin. Then he pressed it against the slick, waxen flesh covering Krantz’s chest and made a hesitant cut. Shuddering, Damonte let go of the knife and turned away, retching. His back was still to me. The knife jutted from Krantz’s chest. The stench of vomit now coalesced with the other odors in the room, and my stomach stopped hurting. I closed my eyes. The dizziness passed as abruptly as it had begun.

When I opened my eyes again, Damonte had turned his attention back to the task at hand. He was still turned away from me, and was hunched over, cutting with one hand and tugging on strips of flesh with the other. It took me a moment to realize that he was trying to skin Krantz—and doing a horrible job of it. Rather than pulling it away in sheets, Krantz’s skin came off in hunks. I wondered if Damonte had never seen a deer butchered growing up. Had he been from around here? I could no longer remember. Fatigue and hunger had sapped not only my physical strength, but my mental alertness, as well. Damonte didn’t seem to be faring much better. He kept retching and gasping, and his entire body quivered in disgust. As he yanked off another strip of flesh and laid it aside, he continued whispering to himself—nonsensical utterances of revulsion and despair, interspersed with the occasional sob.

“Just ain’t right,” he moaned. “Fucking bullshit. I can’t take this anymore…”

I decided to put him out of his misery.

When Damonte returned to the job of butchering, I crept up behind him and clamped one hand over his mouth. At the same time, I jabbed the screwdriver into the back of his neck, just at the base of his spine. I’d seen it done in movies before, but let me tell you, it’s a lot harder in real life. I had to push hard to get through the skin and cartilage, and Damonte fought, although weakly. His struggles quickly turned to jerky, spasmodic movements as the screwdriver slipped in all the way to the handle. When he stopped moving, I released him. He slumped to the floor, and the garbage bags gave one final rustle. The screwdriver still jutted from his neck. I grabbed the handle of the butcher knife instead, and yanked it free from Krantz’s chest. It felt good in my hand. I bent down and stabbed Damonte a few more times with it, just to be sure he was dead, and to get a feel for the knife’s weight. Then I wiped the blade and handle on Damonte’s bags. Then I straightened up again and saw something that startled me so bad I nearly screamed.

A little girl stood before me, just inside the closed door. She wore a blue cotton dress with a pretty floral print pattern. The color matched that of her eyes. Her blonde hair was done up in pigtails, and her white stockings and black shoes seemed brighter and cleaner than anything else in the room. Maybe it’s because they weren’t coated with blood and gore, the way my own feet were. Or maybe it was because she seemed to radiate.

“I know you,” I whispered. “You’re the little girl who is supposed to haunt this place.”

I wasn’t scared. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t. Once I’d gotten over the initial fight of unexpectedly finding someone else in the room with me after I’d just killed Damonte, I found her presence almost soothing. It was reassuring to know that I could now see a ghost, because it reconfirmed what I’d been suspecting for the last hour or so.

“I’m dead, right? I knew it. I fucking knew it! That’s why I can hear Alyssa’s voice in my head, and it’s why I can see you. I’m dead, and this is Hell. I’m trapped here. Right?”

The apparition didn’t say anything. She merely stared at me with those impossibly big blue eyes. They seemed to grow larger by the second. The illusion didn’t scare me, but it did leave me unsettled.

“So if I’m dead,” I continued, stepping toward her, “then none of this matters anyway, right? The things I’ve done here. The things we did to each other. None of it matters because none of it is real. I wonder, was I ever even down here, really? Did I die up top, when the zombies first came, and everything since then has just been another part of Hell? I mean, I know I didn’t go to Heaven. Not after what I did to Alyssa. Or Hannah, even. There’s no way I’d get into Heaven after hurting them both like that. So it would stand to reason that I’m in Hell. Why are you here though, I wonder? Are you in Hell, too?”

The little girl still didn’t respond. Her eyes had grown even larger, shadowing out the rest of her face. As I watched, they converged into one and swallowed her nose and mouth. Her bangs now served as eyelashes. Her entire face was gone, replaced by one giant, staring pupil.