Entombed

NINE

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.

“Jesus,” I whispered. “What the fuck is wrong with me? What is happening here? I just want to go home. I want things to go back to the way they were before. Please?”

The ghost pointed to the door. The gesture seemed accusatory.

“Why don’t you talk? I mean, I know you don’t have a mouth anymore, but why don’t you speak inside my head or something? I don’t understand. What do you want me to do? What are you trying to say?”

She waggled her finger as the eyeball continued to grow, absorbing her entire head. Then she stepped aside, still pointing. I brushed past her and placed my hand against the door. When I turned to look, the girl was gone. Not even the eyeball remained.

“I’m not crazy,” I said.

I’m not sure who I was talking to. Krantz, Drew, Dave and Damonte didn’t respond. If they had, I wouldn’t have been surprised. If this was indeed Hell, then they weren’t really dead. I’d seen the proof myself. Watched it spill into the hotel. Watched it consume our world. Watched it displayed on the video monitors. There was no death. Things didn’t die here. People and animals didn’t die. They came back, to torment the living.

I patted my pocket and felt Jeff’s wooden coin rub against my thigh. I thought of the slogan emblazoned on the token—IT IS WHAT IT IS. That was good advice. It worked for me.

I pushed the door open and strode out into the hallway. I didn’t care anymore about being heard, because it didn’t really matter. I wanted Chuck and Nicole and Emma to know I was coming. I wanted them to be afraid. I wanted my wife back, and they were the key to finding her. If they were fearful, then maybe this would go a lot quicker.

I shoved the dining room door open, took two steps inside, and saw Alyssa and Hannah standing against the far wall. They looked as surprised as I felt, but they also seemed terrified.

“It’s okay.” I held up my hand to reassure them both, realizing too late that I was still clutching the butcher knife. I lowered it again. “Hannah? I knew Alyssa was here, but are you dead, t—”

Too late, I noticed the figure looming to my left. I started to turn but Chuck lunged forward and swung one of the dining room’s metal folding chairs at my head. It connected with a loud crack that deafened me for a few moments. I felt my teeth shatter and my jaw went numb. It was a sickening sensation, worse than any of the pain I’d experienced up until then. I tried to scream but only managed to squawk. My cheek felt hot and wet, and my vision dimmed.

Chuck growled, a primal, animalistic sound that had no human cadence or syllables. His face was a mask of ferocity. He lifted the chair to strike again, but I darted to the right until I was out of his reach. The girls screamed. I wanted to scream, too. Chuck didn’t scream. He grunted. Raising the knife, I turned to face him. My face throbbed.

“Come on, you fucker.” I don’t know if he understood me or not. I could barely understand myself. It hurt to talk. Hurt to breathe. My grip on the knife tightened.

I expected Chuck to charge me, or at least growl some more, but he didn’t. Instead, he stood up straight and held his ground. A crooked smile slowly broke across his face. This was the only opportunity I’d had since entering the dining room to really study him. The first thing I noticed was that he was naked. I wondered how I’d missed that fact until now. He’d drawn different symbols and doodles on his skin with what looked like black permanent marker. They seemed meaningless and random—sigils and runes, a star, a ridiculous pair of tits with a vagina beneath them (no face or body to accompany them), a crude maze with a black squiggle at the center, a cat head, a dog head, several stick figures engaged in various sex acts, and what appeared to be some kind of flag. While the effects of starvation were evident, Chuck was still in decent shape and much bigger than me. Despite losing some of his muscle mass, and despite the fact that his ribs showed through his skin just like the rest of us, I had no doubts that he was still stronger than me. If I let him get in close, he’d easily overpower me. Plus, he was obviously insane. Maybe he’d been crazy to begin with, or maybe he’d just contracted cabin fever after being cooped up for so long down here in the bunker, but whatever the cause, Chuck was absolutely bat-shit.

“You shouldn’t have disobeyed me, Pete.” His tone was almost sad.

“Fuck you.” I spoke slowly. Each syllable was an exercise in agony. “Who died and put you in charge?”

“I’m in charge because I was meant to be. I’m the strongest. That means I’m the leader.”

“You’re not a leader, Chuck.” I ignored the pain. “You’re a cable repairman.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I was a cable repairman. Now, I am something else.”

“Yeah, you are. You’re crazy.”

“Crazy?” Laughing, Chuck edged closer to me. “Have you seen yourself lately, Pete? Crazy! Pot, meet kettle.”

I opened my mouth to respond and one of my teeth fell out. Instinctively, I glanced down at it, and Chuck threw the chair at me and lunged. I jumped back. The chair hit me, but the force was lessened. Chuck followed it, fists raised. He swung at my face, probably hoping to finish what he’d already started on my jaw, but I pulled my head back and slashed at him with the knife. The blade slid across the underside of his forearm, leaving a red line through several makeshift tattoos. Chuck yanked his arm away, but made no sound. He swung again, this time with an uppercut. His fist sank into my stomach, knocking the wind from my lungs. I staggered backward, desperately trying to breathe and clutching the knife. If I let go of it now, he’d kill me in seconds.

Alyssa and Hannah both screamed. I glanced in their direction and was surprised to see that Nicole and Emma had taken their place. I tried to cry out, tried to ask where the others had gone, but all I could do was wheeze. Thick strands of bloody saliva ran from my mouth. Chuck surged toward me, ready to rain down more blows. I lashed out with the knife and he fell back, just beyond my reach.

“Give up,” he said, grinning. “Give up now and I promise you I’ll make it quick.”

Gasping, I shook my head.

Chuck laughed. “Look at yourself, Pete. You’re a mess. How long do you think you can last? Why do this to yourself? It’s not like you’ve got anything to live for, anyway. I mean, your wife is dead by now. Not that I see why you’d care. Not after the way you fucked around on her.” He paused, noticing my expression. “Oh, yeah. I heard all about that from your co-workers. People still like to gossip, even if it’s the end of the world. I know your secrets, Pete. You’re not the hero in this movie. I am. I’m the guy who—”

I screamed as I leaped at him—a hoarse, wounded, inarticulate cry of pure rage and grief. Blood flew from my mouth. The pain was overwhelming, but I didn’t care. The things Chuck was saying hurt me far worse than shattered teeth or a possibly-broken jaw. I thrust the knife forward, not caring where I hit. The first swipe opened a cut on his bicep, but Chuck managed to dodge the next two strikes. He swung again at my stomach, but I slapped the blow away. His fist glanced off my forearm, and I lost feeling in my hand for a second.

Chuck grabbed my other wrist and squeezed, trying to force me to drop the knife. The pain was incredible. It felt like my bones were being ground together. His teeth were bared in a grimace, and his breath was hot on my face. He squeezed harder, and then grabbed my other hand. I worked up a mouthful of blood and saliva and then spat it in his face. It stank. Flinching, he reeled backward, but didn’t let go. I stomped on the arch of his bare foot and he yelled. Suddenly, the pressure was gone and my arms were free again.

“Kill you,” he shouted. “Kill you, you crazy fuck.”

“You’re the one whose crazy, Chuck.”

He did something unexpected then. Instead of throwing another punch or lunging at me, he dropped to the floor and swung his leg out, kicking me hard in the knee. There was a popping noise, followed by a fresh burst of pain. My legs buckled and I dropped. I barely managed to keep my grip on the knife.

On the far end of the dining room, Nicole and Emma had turned back into Alyssa and Hannah again. Both of them cowered atop a table in the far corner, watching with horror as I fought to rescue them.

“It’ll be okay,” I tried to say, hoping they could understand me. “It will all—”

Chuck’s heel slammed into my chin, jerking my head up and knocking me backward. My teeth clamped down on my tongue, and my mouth filled with more blood. Something small but solid slid down my throat, and I wondered if I’d just swallowed a piece of myself. If so, it was the only thing I’d had to eat in too long a time. My stomach growled again. I lay there, sprawled on my back. The lights seemed to dim and there was a rushing sound in my ears. When I tried to sit up, I found to my dismay that I couldn’t. My body didn’t seem to work anymore. Worse, I’d lost the butcher knife and was now defenseless.

Chuck squatted over me, one knee on each side of my ribs, and grabbed my collar. Then he leaned over and yanked my head up off the floor until my face was only inches from his. I watched my blood run slowly down his cheeks and forehead.

“I’m not even going to bother to cook you,” he said. “I’m going to eat you raw.”

I shook my head. When I opened my mouth to speak, all that came out was a low wine. The room wouldn’t stop spinning.

“What’s that?” he asked, leaning closer still. “What did you say, Pe—”

I clamped down on his nose with my broken teeth and with every last reserve of strength, bit him as hard as I could. I can honestly say that I think it hurt me worse than it hurt him, but at that moment, I didn’t care. The result was instantaneous. Chuck wriggled and shrieked as if he’d been electrocuted. Warm blood—his blood—filled my mouth, and I relished the taste. It was different from my own. He tried to pull away, but I exerted more pressure. My jaw and teeth were in agony, and the harder I bit, the more it hurt. I’d never felt anything more delightful. It was better than sex. He struggled harder, hammering me with wild, frantic blows, but I barely felt them. His blood rejuvenated me. Filled me. The pain was like the morning’s first cup of coffee. I felt reborn.

Chuck gave one final, mighty heave and my teeth clacked together as his nose came off in my mouth. Screaming, Chuck toppled backward. Blood gushed from the ragged hole in his face. His hands fluttered to the wound in a futile attempt to staunch the flow. I sat up slowly, chewing the morsel, relishing the taste and feel and texture. I wanted more. As Chuck flopped around, I found my knife.

I tried to speak, tried to tell him that the first thing I’d need to do was skin him, because I didn’t relish eating those magic marker tattoos. I wanted to tell him these things, but I didn’t because it hurt too much to talk. Instead, I decided to just show him what I intended to do.

And then I did.

It is what it is. Just like it says on the wooden token.

You do whatever you have to do to survive in this place. Things are how they are. And if the situation changes, and life throws you a curveball, then you’d better well fucking adapt.

Adapt or die.

I didn’t know for sure if we were alive or dead, in the bunker or in Hell, and in the days since all of that happened, I still don’t know. But Alyssa and Hannah are here with me, and that’s all that really matters, in the end. They screamed a lot, the first day, but they calmed down after I proved that I could provide for them. They’re not hungry anymore. They won’t starve. Oh, believe me, it wasn’t easy, proving myself to them. They didn’t want to eat at first. I had to force them. But I think they like it now. They like staying alive.

Chuck was the alpha male, but Chuck is gone. Now, I am the alpha male. That means I’m the leader. The leader of the pack. The top dog in this dog eat dog world, and as such, we ate the former top dog first. Now we’ve started on the others. They should last us awhile. And, eventually, when we run out of food again, I’ll finally open the bunker doors and go outside in search of fresh meat. Those things out there can’t hurt us. I have no fear of them.

I’m already dead.