The Gates of Byzantium

CHAPTER 1 JOSH

Pros and cons: What were they?

Pros: Finally, after crushing on Gaby since the sixth grade and following her adventures throughout middle school and high school, he was finally spending quality time with her. Best of all, she wanted to spend those times with him.

Cons: They were surrounded by undead creatures, some of which might very well be their relatives and friends and neighbors and even, God forbid, teachers. That forced them to hide at night and move in the day. The creatures wanted them. Or, more specifically, the blood pumping through their veins. Another big con: The world had gone to hell, so there was no help coming from the state or the government or whoever was still out there. Which meant they were, for all intents and purposes, on their own.

Conclusion: The pros win by a landslide.

He guessed others might see it a little bit differently; but then again, others weren’t Josh. They didn’t live next door to Gaby. Of course, it could just be the hormones talking. The hormones ran wild when Gaby came up, and she came up often in his mind. He would be horrified if she ever knew that, but Josh took some comfort in the very real fact that there were more dangerous things out there than his unbridled desire for Gaby.

“Jesus, you’re gone again,” Matt said.

Josh knew he was daydreaming as soon as Matt’s deep baritone voice reached him. He tried to play it off. “So are we doing this or what?”

Matt chuckled. “Okay, kid, whatever you say.”

Kid?

That was rich coming from Matt, who was exactly seven months older than him. Not that being eighteen going on twenty, thanks to that unshaven jawline of his, mattered in the brave new world. Still, Josh wished he could sprout hair like that. It was genetics. His father couldn’t grow a beard to save his life, and neither could any of his cousins.

“I feel kind of bad,” Matt said. “Someone spent a lot of time on this.”

“Seriously?” Josh said.

“Yeah, don’t you?”

“Nah.”

Matt laughed. “Man, you’re cold. Were you always this cold before?”

They were standing in front of a Thanksgiving mural, part of a corner grocery store window. Josh stared at a big pumpkin clutched dangerously tight in a young girl’s hands. The girl was wearing a one-piece Sunday picnic dress with a blue bow in her hair. People were serving meals and shaking hands and laughing around her. It was actually a pretty nice mural, drawn in some kind of watercolor that stayed on the glass. He didn’t know how that worked. How did watercolor even stay on glass months later?

Matt picked up a rock from the sidewalk. He was a big kid, almost six feet tall, with a shaggy haircut getting longer every day. To look at him, you would think Matt played football, basketball, or maybe baseball. But he didn’t. No on all three. Matt wasted his size and spent his time…doing whatever the heck he did before all this. Josh didn’t even know Matt existed until eight months ago.

“Well, sorry, window, but you had a nice run,” Matt said, and flung the rock.

The window shattered into hundreds of pieces, taking half of the girl’s face with it. Matt picked up his baseball bat and batted down the rest of the girl’s face, along with other jagged shards clinging to the edges of the window frame.

There was enough sunlight that they didn’t have to be afraid of what lurked inside the store. You always had to be careful with the shadows, even in broad daylight. The bloodsuckers were good at hiding. They usually slept in the daytime, but you couldn’t really count on that.

They climbed inside, crunching glass underneath their sneakers. Josh slung the empty backpack over his right shoulder, hoping to find something to fill it with this time. Lancing, Texas, was not the biggest city in the state, but it was bigger than the podunk no-name town they had raided for food and supplies two months ago. There were enough stores and houses here to keep them happy for a while, but as always happened, they had to go farther and farther out of their comfort zone to find more.

Josh headed straight for the back room. He could hear Matt moving around behind him, going through the shelves, grabbing bags of snacks and anything else that hadn’t expired yet. Josh could smell rotten vegetables and fruits to his right.

The greens aisle, I presume.

Greens weren’t going to be of much use now. It was all about non-perishables, and as much as grocery stores kept those on the shelves out front, they kept even more in the back. He wouldn’t have known that before; but then again, he rarely went into grocery stores looking for food in the “good old days.”

He gripped the steel prying bar tightly in his right hand. The thing was bright blue, over fifty-six inches long and three and a quarter inches wide, with a slight angle at the end that made it easy to slip into tight crevices for prying. Thus, the name “prying bar.” It also served as a defensive or offensive weapon in a pinch.

Josh didn’t need the bar on the back room door. It wasn’t locked, so he turned the doorknob first, then pulled it open slowly, revealing blackness inside. Just his luck, there wasn’t a single window in the whole room. Not even a tiny skylight to brighten the place up. It was pitch-black, and there was no telling what was hiding in there.

Darkness had ceased being their friend a long time ago.

He fished out his flashlight from one of the pockets of his cargo pants. He switched it on and moved it around the back room. Empty boxes on the floor, a mop and cleaning supplies, and what looked like a stack of used overalls.

And there, way in the back, two shelves filled with thick, bulging boxes. His heart leaped in his throat.

Jackpot.

Josh thought about calling Matt over. Matt had the baseball bat and he was bigger, and if he went in first, well, they could find out if there really were any bloodsuckers hiding inside. Josh could stay outside and wait for the all-clear signal. If push came to shove, Josh could back away from the door, into the sunlight and safety. Matt, on the other hand…

Shit, it’s not like I know the guy.

He sighed. Yeah, like he could really do that. The lonely part of him, the one who spent all his nights at home surfing the web, might have been able to use Matt as bait. But the new him, the one who had befriended Matt and Gaby and escaped their shitty cubbyhole of a small town together, couldn’t.

God help him, he had become fond of the big doofus.

“Matt!” Josh shouted.

“Yeah?” Matt called back.

“I’m going into the back room.”

“Be careful, man.”

“If you hear me yelling like a little girl…”

Matt laughed. “I gotcha back.”

Josh leaned into the doorway and banged the bar against the wall, then listened to the echo waft through the room.

“That you?” Matt, alarmed, shouted from behind him.

“Yeah,” Josh shouted back. “I’m making sure there’s nothing in here. Maybe I can lure them out.”

“Good luck with that. They’re not that stupid.”

“Yeah, well, you never know.”

Matt was right. The bloodsuckers weren’t stupid. Josh had seen them up close, seen the way they pounced and attacked, always relying on their numbers. Then again, stupid creatures wouldn’t have been able to take over the world in one night. At first, Josh had thought it was just their little corner of the universe — Ridley, Texas, population 4,100 in a good year — but he had learned the truth quickly enough.

No, the bloodsuckers weren’t stupid at all.

Josh took a breath and stepped into the back room, gripping the cold steel rod tightly in his right hand, ready to swing. He swept the room again with the flashlight. The backpack felt light and empty behind him, and his sneakers did what sneakers do — they squeaked ridiculously loud against the cheap, tiled floor.

He made a beeline for the shelves in the back, careful not to move too fast, running the flashlight along every inch of the room for signs of occupancy. Corner to corner, around the empty and opened boxes on the floor, the piles of clothes nearby, an old raggedy couch, a bucket, and a mop. Nothing. Just the sound of his movements, the sound of Matt tossing things around in the store beyond the opened door.

Jesus, Matt, you’re louder than my grandma without her meds, man.

Then he was suddenly at the shelves. Josh grinned at the first box he saw, labeled “Canned Fruits.”

Jackpot, mofos!

Josh leaned the prying bar against the shelf and stuck the flashlight between his teeth. He reached for the nearest box, but before he even touched it, the shelf wobbled and Josh froze.

And he heard it (and smelled it) and alarms began ringing inside his head. In the second or two it took Josh to pull back his hands and reach for the bar, the shelf wobbled again as the bloodsucker leaped down from the top of the shelf — where it had been hiding all this time — and crashed right into Josh.

The force of the impact threw Josh back to the floor. The flashlight flew from Josh’s mouth, the lens shattering against the concrete floor, even before Josh crumpled nearby in a heap of blinding pain. The creature was on top of him, gripping him with long, slender fingers, and Josh’s nostrils flared at the pungent smell of the thing’s breath, the unmistakable odor of death that seethed from the gnarled flesh and the rotting muscles underneath.

He let out a scream before he could stop himself (Oh, man, Matt’s going to have fun over that one), and the adrenaline rushed through him, pumping him full of urgency and somehow, somehow, Josh was able to throw his right elbow into the bloodsucker’s cheek. He felt the bone underneath what was left of the creature’s flesh breaking, and the thing flopped off him. Josh scrambled to his hands and knees, saw the bright blue prying bar nearby, the color giving it away in the blackness.

He leaped for it and got the bar by the middle section just as he landed, feeling another massive stinging sensation ripple through his body as he crashed back against the floor. Josh could feel it coming—smell it getting closer — and he spun around and saw the creature flying through the air. He swung on instinct and caught it in the head. It jerked off course and landed on the floor three feet away from him, bony arms and legs making a hell of a racket against the hard concrete.

Josh fought for his footing, managing to get up on his knees before the bloodsucker beat him to it. There was a big gash in its left cheek, thick clumps of coagulated black blood dripping free. There wasn’t a lot of it because the bloodsucker was small and frail, and it looked miserably weak, almost malnourished, though it was hard to tell with them. This one looked especially pathetic, as if it hadn’t eaten in a while, and Josh wondered pointlessly how long it had been in here, just waiting for some idiot to stumble cluelessly inside. Some idiot like him.

The creature opened its mouth and bared its teeth, revealing filthy, dirty, brown- and yellow-stained teeth, chipped and crooked and twisted. “Meth teeth,” he remembered thinking the first time he saw a bloodsucker, on the night everything changed forever.

They were hairless creatures, more animal than man, with pruned flesh and skin that hung loosely over bones underneath, like ill-fitting clothes. Their dark black eyes, lifeless and pale, gave away that they were no longer human. There was a thick, overwhelming smell about them that reminded Josh of his dog Sally, especially after she had gotten into the trash cans.

The bloodsucker leaped into the air again. It was fast — so much faster than Josh had expected — and Josh was staggering backward even before he had completely risen to his feet. He felt the edge of the metal shelf dig into his back as he bumped into it, and boxes tumbled down around him. One box hit him on the head and Josh thought, Oh, great, now I have a concussion, too. Can this day get any worse?

But it did, because soon Josh was on the floor again, and the bloodsucker was on top of him. It glared down at him, emotionless eyes like the pits of some hell Josh used to read about on the Internet while everyone else was out having fun. He felt skeletal fingers digging into the flesh of his shoulders through his T-shirt as it pinned him down and opened its mouth. Josh stared into the cavern of ugly, twisted, disgusting teeth, like something out of a nightmare. His stomach twisted into knots, the disgust of being this close to the creature overcoming even the fear of the moment.

The bloodsucker grabbed his head and turned it, lowering itself toward his exposed neck. Josh felt weak and stupid and useless under its grip.

Thick, sticky black blood dripped down from the gash in the creature’s cheek. The blood caressed Josh’s temple and he winced. It didn’t hurt or sting, but the reality of coming in contact with their blood was enough to make him want to retch.

He closed his eyes and stopped fighting the bloodsucker and thought about other things, of Gaby. Lovely, lovely Gaby. He hadn’t been sure she could possibly get any lovelier than when he had seen her that first time in sixth grade. She got prettier as she grew up, and now that she was eighteen, he was certain she was the most beautiful girl in the world. It was too bad he never had the courage to tell her, even before all of this. And now he never would.

Regrets. He had so many regrets.

Oh fuck it, just get it over with, you smelly piece of shit.

Sticky saliva dripped down on him as the bloodsucker put its mouth over his neck, and it was about to take a bite when Josh heard a loud, bloodcurdling scream that sounded very familiar coming from behind the creature. Josh’s eyes snapped open at the same time the bloodsucker lifted its head away from his neck and turned just as ping! — and the bloodsucker looked like it was levitated up into the air by some unseen force, off of Josh, and flung sideways. Josh swore he could hear the creature’s bones clattering as it landed roughly in a pile across the room.

He saw Matt — big, muscular, handsome Matt — standing over him, the bright, open doorway perfectly framing him in some kind of heroic pose.

Oh, come on, he saves my life and gets the heroic profile, too? This is too much.

Matt stood with the aluminum baseball bat in his hands, and he was changing up his grip on the shiny weapon when the bloodsucker sprang back to its feet like nothing had happened. Of course the creature hadn’t felt anything. What was Josh thinking? He had caught the thing twice in the face and it kept coming. And he had a steel bar. All Matt had was an aluminum baseball bat.

Josh scrambled to his feet, groping the semi-darkness for the prying bar, even as he heard a loud scream behind him. He looked back, afraid Matt was getting the worst of it, only to find Matt wading into the creature, swinging the bat like it was some toy, tiny in his big hands. Matt was connecting with every swing, and Josh heard the loud, almost sickening ping! ping! ping! every time Matt hit pay dirt and crushed flesh and broke bones.

But the bloodsucker kept coming, and coming…

Josh finally spotted the prying bar. It had slid underneath the metal shelf. He dived to the floor and stuck his hand underneath and grabbed the bar and pulled it out. He was back on his feet again, turning, just in time to see Matt letting out another wild scream as the bloodsucker clamped down on his left arm with its teeth and blood splattered again. Thick, bright red blood.

Matt’s.

Matt, in a fit of rage, dropped the bat and grabbed the creature and pried the undead thing off his left hand with impossible brute strength.

My God, he’s strong.

The bloodsucker stumbled back and obscenely licked the corners of its mouth with a long, reptilian tongue. Most of its lower jaw was covered in blood.

“Fucker!” Matt shouted, and scrambled for his bat.

The bloodsucker looked back at him with dead, pale eyes and kept licking at the blood coating its mouth. It wasn’t paying attention to Josh at all, and Josh took the moment to rush forward and thwack! got the bloodsucker in the back of the head. The blow sent it stumbling to the floor. Josh thought he might have even heard the creature’s skull breaking into a million pieces when he landed the blow, but when the bloodsucker lifted its head and looked back at him, utter annoyance on its face, Josh wasn’t so sure anymore.

“Fucker!” Matt screamed again, attacking, swinging a mighty blow that caught the creature in the face.

The Herculean strike obliterated the creature’s nose — or what was left of it, which wasn’t very much. The bloodsucker stumbled backward, dazed by the blow, reminding Josh of a drunk. It eventually lost its footing and tumbled to the floor as its feet came undone underneath it. It wasn’t dead, but it was hurt. It was still trying to get back up when Matt stood over it and began smashing the bat down into its face.

Over and over and over again, all the while shouting, “Fucker! You fucker!”

Josh was suddenly very sick as he watched Matt turn the bloodsucker’s head into squishy pulp, a puddle of thick black blood (God, that looks like Jell-O) that now coated every inch of the aluminum baseball bat. And Matt was still swinging, still raining blows down on what was left of the head, even though there wasn’t much left of the head at all.

Josh thought about telling Matt to stop, that the bloodsucker was dead, but that wasn’t true. Even with its head bashed in and looking like something that resembled ground beef, the creature’s arms and legs were still moving. Then the creature’s hands groped at Matt’s legs.

Matt felt the tugging and finally seemed to snap out of his momentary insanity. He stopped swinging and staggered back, pulling himself free from the bony hands. The creature was already starting to stand up again, and Josh and Matt found themselves staring, wide-eyed, more shocked than afraid at the moment, as the bloodsucker pulled itself back up to its feet. It did this, even as lumps of flesh and blood and what was left of its head flopped down to the floor around it in thick, disgustingly messy clumps of flesh and bone and muscle.

“Matt,” Josh heard himself say. “I think we should go.”

Matt looked over at him and Josh thought Matt was going to scream “No!”, that he wanted to finish this, but instead Josh saw fear in Matt’s eyes. “Yeah,” Matt said, and stumbled toward the open door.

Josh hurried after him and they staggered their way back into the bright store, back to safety.

Matt was out of breath, his chest heaving. Josh’s heart was pounding at a thousand beats a second, and he didn’t think he remembered how to breathe. They didn’t bother to pick up Matt’s backpack, stuffed with bags of chips and unopened beef jerky sticks. They also stepped over a plastic bag filled with warm Gatorade and water bottles, its contents spilled out on the floor.

Josh didn’t know why, but he looked back and saw the bloodsucker — or what was left of it — standing just inside the darkness of the back room, “looking” after them. Though of course it couldn’t really look anymore. Its eyes were gone, along with its entire face, now pooled on the floor behind it in a puddle. Pieces of skin and what remained of its head hung grotesquely behind its body like a hoodie, something it could pick up and pull back on.

The creature didn’t come out of the back room. It stayed in the shadows, beyond the open door, just beyond the reach of the stretching sunlight. Josh knew the creature would die if it stepped into the sun’s rays. He had seen it happen. Watching the bloodsuckers vaporize before his eyes in sunlight, leaving behind only piles of bones, had been almost as surreal as realizing that the world as he knew it was gone for good.

Josh stared back at the creature, or as much as you could stare back at something that didn’t have eyes or a head anymore. It was a sight he would never forget, and it occupied his entire world, even with Matt wheezing next to him, bleeding all over the sidewalk as they stumbled out into the bright, sweltering Texas heat.

“Oh God, oh God. It bit me, Josh, it fucking bit me!” Matt said. “Oh God, what’s going to happen, Josh? What’s going to happen to me?”