Gregory Norris - Down with the Fallen - A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology

“Use your brains,” Pauline said, looking up from her game of solitaire. “Those things lived all their lives underground. Daylight must be blinding to them. They’re probably hiding inside buildings.”

Gabe threw his hands up. “What would they be doing in there? Either they went back underground, or they migrated in search of food.”

“There’s plenty of food in people’s homes.”

“Uh, I don’t think animals can open fridges,” Weasel said.

“Or cans,” Gabe said.

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’m not going outside to find out.”

“It’s… it’s a supply run. You know, like they do in zombie movies. Gabe thinks—”

“I don’t give a damn what Gabe thinks. I’m not risking my life for a box of fucking hookah tobacco. Seriously, what’s with you and hookahs? You’re like a couple junkies.”

“I… We love smoking hookahs,” Weasel said.

“We’re passionate about it, okay?” Gabe said.

Pauline groaned. “Madness. Fucking madness.”

Gabe laid the shotgun, the nightstick, and the pepper spray on a table. “You take this,” he said, handing Weasel the pepper spray. Before Weasel could protest, Gabe stroked his beard and said, “You’re gonna need a melee weapon.” He went behind the bar and returned with an ornate scimitar. The same scimitar belly-dancers performing at Arabian Nights used as part of their shows, swinging it in rhythm with the music or balancing it on their heads or even holding it in their teeth.

“Umm, Gabe… I think that’s just a prop.”

“It’s not a prop, bro. Look how heavy it is. It’s like a baseball bat.”

They skinned some pillows and fashioned primitive hoods. Then they donned their clothes for the first time in too long and fiddled with the shotgun until they figured out how to switch off the safety. Pauline watched them, her mouth a straight line. “Are you really going to risk your lives for some tobacco?”

Gabe shrugged. “It’s only gonna take like twenty minutes.”

She followed them up the stairs and to the door, her arms crossed around her sweaty torso. “Guys, seriously, this is stupid.”

Weasel stood in the doorway and offered her the key. When she didn’t take it, he swallowed dry phlegm and dropped the key in the nook of her arm, careful not to accidentally touch her breast. He stepped out after Gabe.

Outside, a hundred degrees in the shade. In April. The air was warm and dry, the wind blowing in Weasel’s face hot like the fumes blasting from a car’s exhaust. Heated asphalt cooking his feet through his shoes. A dead, cloudless sky. Mira II looming over everything, twice the size of the Sun. Necrotic spots like clouds of soot marred its orange tail. A cold yellow light glowed in its iris like a luminescent tumor.

Gabe took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He walked with his back stooped, the shotgun pointed forward, glancing over his shoulder as if to make sure Weasel was following. The nightstick stuck out of his back pocket like a metal tail. At the intersection, they heard footsteps and turned to see Pauline hurrying after them, trying to move fast and stay quiet at the same time and failing at both. “I’ll go mad if I stay there alone,” she whispered as she caught up, panting like she had just ran a marathon. In her hand, a lipstick.

“What are you gonna do with that? Paint dicks on their faces?” Gabe asked.

“It’s pepper spray, dumbass. I always have it in my bag.”

The Arabian Nights area had been lucky. Not so the rest of the block. Cracks cut through streets and sidewalks and even buildings. Some were broad enough to rip tires or trap wheels or swallow people whole. Crashed or immobilized vehicles blocked most streets. They passed through a small park with a playground nestled between the trees. Dead grass, dying branches. Desiccated leaves rustling like ghostly whispers. A swing swaying in the wind, its chains too hot to grasp. Silence sepulchral.

Also, bodies. Birds. Cats. Dogs. People. Some broken under falling masonry, others run over by panicked drivers, others still ravaged in manners most bestial. All reduced to bone and bits of skin and fur. The stench wasn’t quite as bad as roadkill, but it was everywhere. It wasn’t long before they sprayed the sidewalk with the semi-digested tuna they’d had for breakfast.

Sprawled in the gutter, they found the bastard child of a crab and a turtle. Big as a raccoon, its shell had been cracked open as if with a rock and the insides devoured. Another of its kind rested against a bus, its pincers torn off in what must’ve been a desperate last stand. More uncanny carcasses dotted the path to Nefertiti . Unlike the crab-turtle things, most of these possessed no exoskeleton, making it difficult to glean their original shapes from what little remained.

Then Nefertiti was up ahead, and in the midst of that fetid graveyard bathed in the glow of a baleful star, Weasel felt the corners of his lips twitch. Its windows were gone, the doors hanging from their hinges, the great sun shade that shielded its terrace torn to strips. Half the building had collapsed. Sticks of rebar poked from smashed walls like malformed ribs.

The little hookah store didn’t fare much better. Its front window was shards and the hookahs had tumbled from their shelves, covering the floor with shattered glass. Gabe crept up to the store like a kid playing soldier. He peeked inside, and gave a thumbs-up. The door was jammed, so he cleared the remains of the window with the nightstick and clambered into the gloom. Minutes oozed like blood. Then Gabe said, “Bingo,” and Weasel let out a breath he didn’t remember holding.

Gabe emerged with a plastic bag full of little carton boxes with drawings of lemons, apples, bananas, strawberries, and cherries plastered above photos of blackened lungs and Smoking Kills signs. He gave the bag to Weasel and said, “Didn’t find any freshmint. But I bet there’s some in Nefertiti .”

“Are you for real?” Pauline said.

“Real as they come, baby.”

“Fuck you.”

“Anytime, anywhere.”

“No, fuck you because my ex-boyfriend used to drop that same stupid line and now you reminded me of that asshole.”

Gabe frowned. “You said you were into chicks.”

“I sure did.”

He snorted, shaking his head. Then he headed for Nefertiti .

They stepped on its terrace and stood in its ruined doorway. A two-level establishment, its second floor was wreathed in shadow and its first littered with torn cushions and broken bottles and fallen hookahs. The stench of rot wafted from within. Under the bar, rooted at the edge of sunlight, lay a couple dozen brown objects. Each was about the size of a fist. And they pulsed.

Weasel heard himself say, “Eggs,” in a child’s voice, and then something on the second floor shifted. A segmented, serpentine body covered in a gnarled carapace. As long as an alligator and almost as thick, it uncoiled itself from the darkness above and fell to the floor with a meaty thud. It stood on its many legs and wiggled its antennae and clicked its mandibles, and he had just enough time to think, A centipede, a giant fucking centipede, oh my God, it’s a giant fucking centipe—

It charged. Pauline screamed, and so did Weasel and Gabe. The shotgun roared and a hole burst in the bar and then the thing lunged. It embraced Gabe’s leg and drove the many moving parts of its mouth into his thigh. He shrieked and went down on his ass. It started shaking him up and down, its head spattered crimson. He pumped the shotgun and shoved the barrel in the thing’s face and its head exploded like a dropped melon.

Another centipede rushed from Nefertiti . Still screaming, Pauline raised her fake lipstick and drenched it in orange poison. But the thing never slowed. It had no eyes. It had evolved in a lightless place that rendered vision minimal and oculars wasteful. It clamped its many legs around Pauline’s torso and dug its mandibles into her throat and slammed her on the concrete like a lioness tackling a gazelle.