Run

Run.

It was the first thought in her head in the morning, and the last thought on her mind before she allowed herself to fall into a restless, fitful sleep every night. Had life ever been different? If it ever was, Sheila didn’t remember it. Even more than the taste of ice cream, she’d forgotten what it had felt like to ever be safe.

Now, being safe meant an abandoned apartment on the eighth floor of a highrise building near midtown where she could barricade the door and not worry about anyone getting at her for a whole night. Being safe meant having a heavy lead pipe right near her hand when she went to bed, because the nine millimeter pistol she’d picked up in Syracuse—or was it Watertown—had finally run out of bullets.

Safe meant running during the day. From everything.

It was maybe nine o’clock in the morning now. Two hours after dawn, anyway. Bright light fell on the empty shell of the city. New York had been affected by the spreading horror the same as the rest of the world had. America first. It was safer to move during the day. The Things didn’t like sunlight. They preferred shadows and dark spaces. That’s why she had five flashlights in her duffle bag.

When darkness came, being unprepared meant death.

Run.

Her stomach growled. It brought Sheila back to the moment, dragging her thoughts away from what had been, what could have been, what should be. She looked around herself, paying attention to the street she was on for the first time. Red brick apartment buildings and closed storefronts with their plate glass windows shattered and their shelves ransacked. When the Angelica infection couldn’t be stopped, everyone had taken what they could and ran. Anyone left behind had taken whatever was left, and then ran, too.

If they were lucky.

The ones left behind were worse than dead.

Sheila had met a few survivors, like herself. People who were uninfected and just trying to make their way across a devastated landscape of human remains. None of the survivors had been interested in her, and she had returned the favor. For the last year and a half now, it had been only her.

It was safer that way.

She stumbled out of the street and over to the sidewalk, her feet shuffling through filth and debris, stepping around the remains of the dead that were literally lying everywhere. She tried not to look at those. Most were eaten down to the bones by wild animals and by…the Things. Others still had bits of themselves still in place and Sheila had seen enough of that to last her a lifetime.

The Things. That was what she called them. Just before the world had gone dark she’d seen a scientist being interviewed on television. He’d used a big, long word to name the monsters people had turned into once they contracted the Angelica infection. It was so long, that Sheila could never remember it. It didn’t matter. To Sheila, the infected humans were just Things.

She made her way to the first apartment building she came to, up the front steps, to the double doors that were open to the inside. Their green paint was peeling, the number of the apartment building falling off the rusty screws. Maybe it had been this way before the world had gone to Hell in a handbasket. Hard to say.

Through the doors was a hallway shrouded in darkness. Stairs littered with old clothes and toys and wet, moldy newspapers led up to other floors. Somewhere in here, no doubt, would be apartments with food still stacked in the cupboards. Canned beans, or boxes of mac and cheese. There were always a few apartments that the looters had missed. And, of course, the Things had no interest in that kind of food.

They only wanted meat.

Sheila stared down the dark corridor, considering how badly she wanted to eat. Was it worth going into the shadows where the Things liked to lurk?

Her stomach growled again. Today it was.

Unshouldering her backpack, the good nylon one she’d gotten in a WalMart that hadn’t been completely ransacked yet, she dug out one of the flashlights. It was a five cell Maglight, heavy enough to kill someone, bright enough to make midnight look like high noon.

Turning it on, she waved it around the entry hall. Nothing screamed or ran for cover. That usually meant it was safe to enter.

Usually.

Slowly, she went from apartment to apartment. Most still had their doors open. One she was able to kick in. The other two she left alone. Too much trouble.

The first floor apartments were all empty of everything except furniture and televisions and heavy stuff like that. Nothing of value. She did find a nice pink sweatshirt tucked into a shelf in a closet. That went into the top of her backpack for when the nights got colder.

In an apartment on the second floor she found what she was looking for. Five cans of baked beans, a whole six pack of cola, and six boxes of shells and cheese. The kind with the cheese sauce all ready in the foil package. No need to add water, no need to heat it up. Crunch the pasta, slurp the cheese.

Closing the apartment door again and hauling the couch over to barricade the door, Sheila sat at the kitchen table and ate her meal. She washed it down with two cans of the warm soda. A feast fit for a king by anyone’s standards nowadays.

Afterward, she dropped her head down on the table, closed her eyes, and cried.

It was the screaming that woke her up. A woman or a small child or both maybe, crying out for help. Instantly she was up, backpack over her shoulder, racing for the door. Not to rush out and help whoever that was.

She was running to get away from whatever was happening.

Running meant safety. Always run. Never look back.

At the door she pushed the couch away and then stopped to listen. She could still hear the yelling, the cries for help. Upstairs, it sounded like. One of the two other floors above her. Good. She could get out.

Pulling the door open she swept the flashlight up and down the hallway, finding nothing there that shouldn’t be. She ran for the stairs.

Then she stopped, and listened again.

“Help me!” the cry came. “Please, help me!”

Sheila closed her eyes tightly and argued within herself for all of two heartbeats before she kept going to the stairs.

Instead of going down, she went up.

This was never how she did things. Not if she wanted to live. And she desperately, furiously wanted to live. There was someone up there, and they needed help, and somehow that meant more to her in that moment than her own instincts to live.

On the next floor up she cautiously crept out into the hallway,

The yelling stopped.

Her blood froze. She took five more steps, no more than that, her flashlight shaking in her hand. “H-hello?” she stammered out.

“Hello,” a voice said from behind her.

A sharp pain blossomed at the back of her neck and she only knew darkness for a time.

When she woke up again, she was sitting in a chair. It was a comfortable chair, with wide arms and a wide back that she nearly sank into. Her feet were tucked up under her like she’d just sat down to take a nap and didn’t have a care in the world.

Her eyes snapped open, and she bolted up from the comfy chair, to her feet, noticing she didn’t have her sneakers on and she didn’t have her backpack and the protective flashlights and the new sweater she’d found or her stockpile of food, or…or…

Where was she?

The room she was in was decorated with brown and yellow wallpaper and there were paintings of peaceful landscapes on the walls and a library of books on a shelf across from her. There were no windows. There was only one door.

Where the hell was she?

“The first thing you should do,” the same voice from the apartment hallway said, “is not panic.”

Run, her mind told her. Run.

There was just nowhere to run to.

She turned around, so she didn’t have her back to him. It was a him. A young guy about her age, dressed in jeans and a button-up white dress shirt, blonde hair messy across his forehead and eyes bright and kind. There was a few days’ growth of beard on his face, and he somehow managed to look tired even as he smiled.

“I know you have questions,” he said to her. “We’ll try to answer them.”

“We?” she managed.

He stood up, and she backed away from him until her back was against the bookcase. “Don’t be afraid. Not here. There’s a group of us here, al survivors like yourself. Sorry for the trick back at the apartment building. We find it’s easier to bring new people in that way.”

Sheila felt the back of her neck. “You drugged me.”

“I did,” he admitted. “I’m sorry. What we’re doing here is too important…here. Come with me. I’ll show you. That should be the easiest way.”

She didn’t know why, but she did exactly like he said, and followed him out of that room and into a hallway. It was a stark contrast to the lavish room they left behind. Cinderblock walls painted white, bare fluorescent tube lighting in the ceiling. Electricity! Sheila nearly tripped over her own two feet to see electricity again.

“We have our own generators,” he explained. “We might be the last place with power in New York, for all I know. We need it, to keep the rooms sealed.”

“What…?”

“Shh,” he told her. “Don’t worry. It’s right up here.”

They passed a few other people, each of whom nodded to her or said hello to the guy with her, calling him by name. Tony. He led her into another tunnel, where the lighting was dimmer.

“They don’t like the light,” he said by way of explanation.

Before she could ask, they were walking down a row of cell-like rooms with glass walls on this side that let them see inside.

Sheila choked on her next breath.

Each room held a Thing.

She shrank away from them, holding her arms out defensively even though she knew that would never work, curling down into a ball in the middle of the hallway, too terrified to do anything except whimper.

Each one was singularly disgusting. People who had been people until the Angelica infection took them. Their skin had turned gray or purple or black, sloughing off in cascades like melting wax. Arms had turned into tentacles or hooks or coils of dangling, writhing flesh. Where their heads should be were mounds of lumpy, crusted bones and their eyes were all misshapen or missing or multiplied into black dots that blinked all over their skulls. Legs were stumpy and uneven and thick as an elephant’s. Each one was a horror dreamt up by a deranged geneticist gorged on Stephen King stories and drug-fueled delusions.

“Hey,” Tony told her, picking her up by her arms, “it’s all right. We’re fine. Those walls are electrified and with the lights out here none of them want to do anything but sit in the corners where we let them have shadows. The doors on the other side are locked and barred. There’s no way for them to get out.”

“Unless the power gives out,” she told him, fear giving her the courage to speak again. “I want my flashlights back, and I want out of this nightmare. Right now!”

“You can’t leave,” he insisted. “It isn’t safe out there. We need all of the survivors to stay here and help us with our work.”

“Work? What work? Collecting these Things?”

“No, oh no. It’s more than that. We’re going to cure them. All of them. I promise you, you’re perfectly safe. As long as we have power—”

With an audible snap and a winding drone, the lights went out all along the hallway.

“That’s impossible,” she heard Tony whisper.

The power had gone out.

Run, her mind told her. Run!

She left Tony standing there and felt her way along the wall back the way they had came. Cinderblock, glass, cinderblock…hallway.

Not knowing anything about the complex she was in she turned right.

Behind her, she heard glass smashing.

Slurping, sucking noises were punctuated by Tony’s screams for help.

People came running towards her, carrying powerful hand-held spotlights that spread a white glow over the entire hallway. The devices were round and plastic and heavy and they were the most beautiful thing Sheila had ever seen. When one of the people, a tall brunette with a serious expression, ran by her, Sheila grabbed at the spotlight she held.

“Hey!” the brunette protested. “Stop that! I need to go help!”

Sheila would not give it up. “We need to run,” she insisted, pulling the heavy device out of the other woman’s hands.

The beam turned to the side, leaving the way behind them in total black.

Writhing ropes of flesh shot out of the shadows and wrapped around the legs and torso and neck of the brunette. They were an oily purple color and they coiled around so tight the woman’s eyes bugged.

Then she was snatched back into the dark.

Sheila flooded the hallway behind her with light. Something squealed and slithered away. The hallway was empty.

She stepped backward, slowly, shuffling her sock feet like an ice skater, keeping the light trained behind her. Things darted back and forth between the shadows, half-human shapes that were impossibly quick. She kept going, never daring to stop, until she felt a door behind her. Reaching around she turned the knob and thanked God above when it wasn’t locked.

When she was through the door she closed it tight, then sighed in relief. She was going to live.

The wiry thin hand grabbed her arm and pulled her around and her light shone up into a face that was barely recognizable as Tony’s anymore. It had melted, shifted, the eyes no longer level with each other and the mouth drooping down his neck. His hair had turned white and fallen out in patches. He looked at her with terror in his eyes.

“Help…me,” he gurgled.

Sheila smashed the round end of the spotlight into Tony’s face, over and over. No more helping, she told herself. That’s what had gotten her here in the first place. No more helping.

All there could be was running.

Bloody and oozing, Tony fell at Sheila’s feet. The flashlight lens had cracked and the light was flickering but she didn’t care. She dashed up the hallway, the floor rising like a ramp as she went, until at the other end she found a door with a crash bar that opened when she shoved at it. She ran out into the open, and stopped short.

It was nighttime. She had run outside, into the dark, into a city filled with monsters that hunt at night.

Around her, she heard them. Slithering, crawling, hissing and whispering. They were everywhere.

And in her hands, the spotlight flickered again. This time it didn’t come back on.

Sheila stared into the dark.

Run, she told herself.

Run.