Dean Koontz - 77 Shadow Street

Winny worried that he might drag Iris into such an extreme experience that she could no longer maintain her new equilibrium, but among the firearms he saw one that he must have. The automatic weapons were probably without ammunition and too corroded to be fired. Anyway, the recoil would knock him on his butt and tear the gun out of his hands, and it would be just his luck that a ricochet would pop him dead-center in the forehead. One rifle, however, had a fixed bayonet, and he could see himself using that. If cornered, it would be better than bare hands.

He whispered, “ We’ll be okay ,” though he was amazed that they weren’t dead already, and he led her into the boneyard. With one hand, he picked up the rifle, and was surprised to discover that it was heavier than he ever imagined. He could carry it for a while with one hand, but if he ever had to brace it against an assault or try to thrust with it, he would need both hands, and he would have to let go of the girl.

The bayonet was firmly fixed to the gun barrel, and as Winny considered whether it was as worth having as it first seemed to be, an eager and inhuman cry echoed out of the massed machinery and off the walls of the vault. It was difficult to place but near enough that Winny feared they would never be able to get out of the open quickly enough to elude the creature—and might dash straight into it. Straight into its claws, its teeth.

Make a stand with the bayonet or hide? Easy. Hide.

Between two of the adult dead was enough room for him and Iris. He pulled her to the floor, encouraging her to sit with her back to the wall, by his side, between the carcasses, each of which leaned toward them. Instead of wrenching loose of him, as she once might have done, her hand tightened on his so hard that she mashed his knuckles together painfully.

The dead men’s clothes had moldered and partly rotted as time had vanished the flesh from their bones, and the tattered garments hung loosely on those macabre frames. Unable to pull free of the girl’s fiercely clenched hand, Winny could use only his left hand to reach across Iris and quickly adjust the greasy coat of the dead man to cover part of her.

The upper half of that skeleton slid along the wall and slumped against the girl, eliciting from her a soft “ Urrrrr ,” nothing more.

Winny flapped part of the clothes of the other dead guy over himself. That skeleton, too, slid along the wall, leaning on him, its bony shoulder against his face.

Most of his and Iris’s bodies—though only part of their faces—were covered. But the light here was poor, the shadows cloaking. They might be safe until someone came to find them, if anyone ever came, or at least for a few minutes, until maybe the creature decided they had slipped out of the HVAC vault and sought them elsewhere.

The portion of the dead man’s rotting coat sleeve that draped half of Winny’s face smelled vile, and he tried not to think about how it had acquired such a disgusting odor. Resisting the urge to gag, he whispered to Iris, “ You’re very brave .”

Off to the right, beyond the section of open floor across which were scattered scores of empty brass casings, twelve or fourteen feet away, the beast appeared from the end of a service aisle. It froze there, alert, turning its head this way and that. Winny thought it might be a good thing that even after all this time the clothes on the skeletons stank of death—and therefore obscured the scent of young life.

The creature abruptly raced past the skeletons and disappeared among the shadows and the machinery, on the hunt. They dared not assume that it was gone for good. They were safer here, among the bones and the reeking garments of the dead, as long as they could tolerate the tension and the smell.

Besides, being able to step out of the chase gave Winny time to think. He needed time to think. He needed like a month.

He whispered to Iris again, “You’re very brave.”

Slick with the cold sweat of both, their hands seemed to be welded together as surely as if the sweat were solder.

One

Pride goes before a fall. But that was then; and this is now. My pride in this matter is justified. I have learned from the entire past of the human race, from even before humanity, from the great arc of time and even from before time. This is my world now, and it shall be forever mine. Those who do not die here will die soon enough in their time, when civilization collapses around them in the Pogrom and the Fade. I am plant, animal, machine. I am posthuman, and the condition of humanity is not my condition. I am free .

33

Here and There

Tom Tran

In Tom’s life, long before this transformation of the Pendleton, there had been moments when events occurred of such grotesque nature that they seemed to distort the very fabric of reality, and in the wake of those events, the laws of nature seemed to become elastic for a while.

The thousands of bodies in the mass grave outside Nha Trang had been an outrage so profound that for a while after he and his father walked the rim of that horror, the world was literally not the same. The jungle through which they fled seemed familiar but changed: the palms appeared deformed, with spiky rather than feathery fronds; eucalyptuses were too dark in color, almost black, and smelled like gasoline; the schefflera that usually bore dull red flowers now were bedecked by blood-red blooms so bright that they seemed artificial; the gum trees and the many ferns, the datura and the waratah, the philodendrons and the cissus weren’t as they always had been before, different in ways that were sometimes obvious but were at other times difficult to define, altered and strange and alien. They spent two days in that wilderness, walking fourteen of every twenty-four hours, when they should have gotten to their destination in eight hours at the most. They were not lost, not wandering in a delirium, so it seemed to both of them that set distances suddenly became elastic, the world more vast and unwelcoming than before.

A similar thing had happened in the inadequate boat in which he and his father eventually put to sea with fifty other refugees. After being set upon by Thai pirates, after thirty of their own people were slaughtered and the pirates took enough losses to retreat, with the decks awash in blood, time seemed to be distorted on the South China Sea, each period of daylight lasting but a few hours, the nights impossibly long and all the stars out of their usual positions in the heavens. Tom knew that anyone not there would insist it had been delirium, but those who endured were certain that it was something more mysterious.

And now, in this changed Pendleton, he and Bailey Hawks moved along corridors that they could swear expanded ahead of them and prowled room after ruined room in apartments and public spaces that he did not remember previously having so many chambers. They were never lost but several times disoriented, gripped by the feeling that this building was far different from the Pendleton of their time not just because of its miserable condition but also for other reasons that eluded them.

They found ever stranger formations of fungi and other growths, heard movement in the walls, and felt the oppressive presence of the hidden ruler of this Pendleton. It must have had some telepathic power, for Tom could feel it curling through his mind like tendrils of cold mist, and Bailey described it as a someone-walking-on-my-grave feeling. What it conveyed to them by this intrusion was its contempt, its unalloyed hatred.

The longer they searched, the more certain Tom became that they would die here, and soon. Yet the attack did not come.