Tim Lebbon: The Cabin in the Woods

Perhaps ten minutes after the first guards met their ends, they heard the pounding of footsteps and a scream of terror as several more arrived. Dana closed her eyes and tried not to hear, but the elevators pinged, the doors hummed open, and it all started again.

Wet things struck the door.

People screamed.

Dana and Marty hugged, thinking perhaps it would never end, and they’d die in here of starvation and terror as the elevators pinged, and things continued to stalk from the nightmares where they should have remained.

“There’s still a chance,” Hadley said. “Really. Still a chance. Maybe we’ll get lucky and… ” But he trailed off, and Sitterson heard his own hopelessness echoed in his friend’s voice. As they worked feverishly at their control panels—trying to contact people beyond their reach, searching for reasons why this was happening—images flickered at random across the viewing screens.

And the images they saw were of chaos and death. Sitterson had just seen a lab worker with whom he’d sometimes enjoyed drinking taken down by a mutant, thrashing as the stick-thin red thing held his arms and vomited onto his face and head. After an instant of motionless shock the man had started writhing and kicking as wisps of smoke rose from his eyes, mouth, and nose, and his head began to melt.

The mutant had sat back for a while, and then it commenced feeding.

Another camera in a corridor deeper in the complex showed a group of workers—lab technicians and administrative staff—fleeing in panic, moments before a horde of flying, scuttling, running monsters came after them. Sitterson tapped keys to track their progress from corridor to hallway to balcony, before the monsters fell on them at last. He watched only until he was certain that none would escape, and then he moved away to give them privacy in their deaths.

A lab worker was knocked from a high balcony in the rotunda, plummeting to his death. Sitterson switched cameras.

A female guard ran screaming from a strange, floating witch-like woman, her long gray hair trailing behind her like exhaust fumes, her spindly fingers catching the woman’s hair and tripping her back. The guard shot a whole magazine into the witch’s face with no effect. The witch grabbed her head and lifted her from the ground, opening an unnaturally wide mouth that closed around the woman’s face and sucked the life from her.

As the woman visibly deflated in her black uniform, the witch’s hair darkened from silvery-gray to dark gray, strands thickening and becoming more lustrous. She cast the shriveled corpse aside and floated away in her search for more.

Sitterson flipped through image after image, skipping past various levels and rooms, hallways and lobbies throughout the complex. One stairwell camera showed a long, steady line of zombies descending the flights, and he tapped a few keys to see where they were going. He wished he hadn’t. A group of people had taken refuge at the base of the stairwell, barricading the doors against the horrors from outside but not considering the fact that they could descend, as well.

The zombies marched down to feed, and the people died badly

A vampire resembling the classic Nosferatu ripped the throat from a screaming woman, splashing the security camera lens with blood.

“Kevin,” said Hadley.

“Where?”

“Corridor three-B.”

“Who’s Kevin?” Truman said from by the door, but they ignored him. If he watched, he’d see soon enough.

Sitterson brought it up onto one of the big screens.

Kevin.

He remembered seeing this man before, knew what he could do, but even so he was briefly taken in by his appearance—quite, calm, normal-looking, he walked amongst the chaos seemingly unperturbed by the terrible things he saw. All around him people were being killed, eaten, torn apart, melted, shriveled, exploded, digested or crushed, and his gentle smile never seemed to change.

But then an injured guard caught his attention. He stopped, knelt by the man’s side, and exsanguinated the man in a matter of seconds.

“Elevator lobby,” Hadley said. “Got, some unblooded coming through.”

“Unblooded?” Truman asked.

“Things that haven’t been used yet,” Sitterson explained. “They’ll be even more bloodthirsty than the rest.” Hadley had brought up a view of the elevator lobby, where the walls were painted red and piles of body parts were scattered across the floor. There were still zombies chewing on bones and rifling through heaps of intestines.

The elevators opened and a man with spinning saws in his head emerged. From another open door, a woman with fire smoldering in her mouth and dripping from her nose. And more, and more, and Sitterson couldn’t understand how any of this was happening.

There were safeguards. Truman started talking into his intercom, his voice quivering in panic. He’d drawn and checked his sidearm, and Sitterson almost laughed at that.

Hasn’t he even been watching?

“Lead Officer Truman to Sec Command, requesting immediate reinforcement. Code Black. Repeat: Code Black. Where the hell are you guys?”

“Why aren’t the defenses working?” Sitterson said, working his control panel. “Where’s the fucking gas?”

“I think something chewed through the connections, in the utility shaft,” Hadley said.

“Something which?”

“Something scary !”

The light flickered and went out. The screens went dead. Sitterson heard a faint cry from Lin down in the control area, and then footsteps as she made her way up to them.

Something hit the door hard enough to buckle its three-inch metal lining.

It’s all going to hell, he thought.

“We can’t just stay here and—” Dana whispered, and then something smashed through the window behind them and stuck against the wall above the control panel. Glass showered over her head and shoulders. She let out a startled cry and jumped up, Marty by her side.

The thing unfurled its leathery wings and turned its head around on a long neck to look their way. A huge bat, with an almost childlike face… a small dragon, with smoke curling from one nostril… she guessed it really didn’t matter which.

The dragonbat growled fire.

“Shit!” Dana hissed. She flicked the lock’s latch and opened the door, backing away from danger even knowing that there might be worse behind her. Marty came with her, gun raised and pointing at the dragonbat thing, and she wondered if he’d even ever fired a pistol.

They slid along the wall away from the guard’s station and scanned the scene around them. The noises were clearer now that they were out of the booth— growling, chewing, wet crunches as skulls were cracked, sucking, drooling, and dripping. The guards were dead and the monsters were eating.

One thing looked their way—it had four eyes and a mouth like something from beneath the sea—and Dana froze. But it dipped its head back to emptying a guard’s holed skull of brain matter and fluid.

Dana hadn’t dared draw a breath since leaving the guard’s booth. And she might have remained frozen there, dinner-in-waiting, if Marty hadn’t grabbed her hand and dragged her toward the corridor that led from the lobby. Things shifted and ate, and just as she thought, Why aren’t they interested in us? a huge, boil-covered monstrosity stood before them and roared.

Boils burst across its body and misted the air, and Marty shot it once in the eye. It staggered back against the wall and slid down, dead.

Dana caught her breath now and ran, Marty by her side. She heard his own heavy breathing, and tried to ignore all the terrible, impossible things around them. They stepped over a body with its guts and organs removed, almost slipped in something wet and warm, and then they were in the corridor leading away from the lobby. Bullet holes pocked the walls here and the entire hallway was a mess of blood and dead bodies. A guard sat against the wall, his eyes wide open and no apparent injury on his body. But Dana has never seen anyone more dead.