The Night Has Teeth - Chapter 7

John finds other survivors and horrors as he starts his trek through town.

Chapter 7

The drawings I had made on the map were crude, but it had been the best I could do. That’s what I told myself anyway. Each time I came to a dead-end street, I cursed under my breath and made a note on the map. I didn’t want to double back in an emergency and find myself stuck. But then again, who knows if I would even have time to check the map if there was an emergency.

The last dead-end I came to was three or four blocks past the main road. It was one I had never driven down in my entire life. It’s funny when you think about that. That there are streets in your city you’ve never seen, even if you pass them every day. I would go by this one on the way to work each and every morning and night, and not once did I even think to glance down and see how other people lived in this part of my city.

The corner had a large, rusted pickup truck at the end. It had crashed into a fire hydrant, but the water had long since been turned off. I didn’t realize how lucky I had been to have running water back at the house.

I followed the curving road along patches of trees and grass to a small cul-de-sac of houses. Each house was a little mid-century museum of life before the attack. Some of them had large glass windows broken open, and dark stains ran down the siding below them like oozing mouths filled with glass.

I walked along the sidewalk in the grass, hoping that the grass would cover any footsteps that might alert the pale ones if they were hiding in the houses.

I looked at the pink and purple clouds on the horizon. It was getting dark. I didn’t have much time to get as far as I could on the first day.

I turned to leave when I heard a scream from one of the houses.

My whole body reacted like a scared cat. I took a low stance and waited. My ears trained on the surrounding buildings.

Another wail filled the air between the houses.

My eyes and ears followed the sound until they stopped in a space between two mid-century homes. One was yellow, with a newer paint job that looked like it had been done over a weekend. The other was a brick house with a large bay window in the front.

Between them were connecting fences. Both of them were high and wooden. But the gates had both been knocked down off their hinges. Splintered wood stood on the piles of both of them.

Something was coming from the backyard of the brick house.

I kneeled down lower and reached into my bag. Slowly, I pulled one of the kitchen knives out and held it at the ready—as ready as I would ever be.

My eyes adjusted as I saw a shape stumble between the houses. I waited to see if my eyes were playing tricks on me. Suppose all the time alone or spent with monsters had ruined any semblance of normalcy. Instead, I loosened my grip on the knife and slowly stood up as the figure stepped out onto the front lawn.

It was a woman holding a baby.

She was middle-aged, dressed in stained clothing, and it looked like the wind could blow her over from exhaustion. There was a look in her eyes that I couldn’t place, but she was staring right at me like I was the first beacon of salvation she had seen in her whole life.

The baby was breastfeeding. I couldn’t believe it. Something so beautiful and wholesome is happening at the end of the world. The blanket that was wrapped around the baby was half red and half white, like a buoy or a bobber on a fishing pole.

I took a cautious step forward. I held out my hand as a sign of good faith.

“Are you okay?” I whispered. “Is the baby okay?”

She smiled at me. In a way, that made me feel like she was about to chew on my frontal lobe. I didn’t want to scare her, so I held my ground and played dumb.

“I couldn’t get her to eat,” she shouted. “No matter what I did, I couldn’t get her to eat. She just kept crying.”

A rattle across the street sent an electric jolt up my spine. I kept my eyes on the woman and placed my finger to my lips to get her to be quiet.

“They could hear her crying,” she said. “They could hear her because she was hungry, but she wouldn’t eat.”

The woman took a few steps closer to me.

That’s when I noticed the smell.

I had been watching death from afar for so long that I forgot the way that a carcass can just attack your nostrils. My eyes and nose worked in tandem as my eyes went from the woman’s trembling face to her chest.

The baby was there, at her breast, but it wasn’t moving. As I leaned closer, I could see the skin of the baby wasn’t right. It looked like the child had all sense of life drained from it like it had been replaced with a rotting doll.

Then I realized that the blanket hadn’t been two colors. It was a white blanket, and the red was blood.

“What happened?” I whispered.

“She wouldn’t stop crying!” the woman shouted.

The entire street shook with the sound of bodies breaking down doors, climbing up walls, and leaping from rooftops.

“You have to be quiet,” I whispered. I began to back away from her into the grass to hide my footsteps.

“They didn’t understand…” she said. “The baby wouldn’t hurt them. They didn’t need to do that…”

I could hear them running like wild dogs up the street behind me. I didn’t want to turn around. I was afraid if I started to run, the woman wouldn’t come with me, and I wouldn’t be able to convince her to get to safety like I was.

“I’m on my way to people who can help,” I said as quietly as I could as the thunder of footsteps approached. “I just need you to be quiet, and we can–”

“I will not be quiet!” she screamed. “They ate my fucking daughter! You fucking moron!”

She lunged forward and shoved me to the ground.

I let my body hit the grass, and I froze. She towered over me and looked down as she held her dead child in one arm.

“But they can’t take her from me. She’s dead, but they can’t take her from me. I’ll show you and everyone that they can’t take her from me!”

I opened my mouth to whisper again, but I never got the chance. Three pale ones, like linebackers, tackled the woman to the ground.

I could hear the bones of her body crack as she hit the pavement. Then, the sound of feverish eating as they ripped into her. More of them ran across the street like rabid dogs as they tore into her like evening supper.

I backed away slowly on the grass and turned to crawl.

Ahead of me, lying on the lawn, was the bundle she had been carrying with her child inside.

I felt a wave of deep despair hit me, and I had to stifle tears and prevent myself from crying at the sight. With each slow crawl, I fought to choke down the pained emotions I wanted to let rip from my body.

I turned my attention to the grass and moved like a snail, carrying my bags carefully so I wouldn’t make the slightest noise. I lost track of time, but it was dark when I crawled back to the pickup truck.

I climbed to my feet and slowly stepped out onto the pavement. I stopped at the corner and gave one last moment of silence to the woman and her baby down the street. Then, with my bag firmly clutched, I started to walk again as the lights of the shops ahead twinkled in the distance.

#

I didn’t spend a lot of time around the shops and bars outside of my neighborhood. Some nights after work, I would drive a little slower down the hill where the medical buildings slowly bled into rental houses and small dive bars.

I never learned the name of the little bar on the corner just before the highway, but its big illuminated sign in the shape of an anchor always let me know I was almost home.

I could see the neon blue light now as I slipped between the alleys of the restaurants and bars. Most of them had their windows boarded up, and the others had been smashed and ransacked.

I didn’t bother looking inside. The last thing I wanted to do was alert the pale ones to someone’s hiding place if they had found a spot with a generator and a way to get food; good for them. There was no sense in me ruining it just because I was curious.

The sun had been down for a while at that point. I knew that it didn’t matter. That the creatures could still feel my vibrations. But somehow, the night made me feel like I could sneak around a little easier.

Honestly, now that I think about it, it might have been because I couldn’t see them.

I walked out of a parking lot into a four-way stop. On one corner was an auto body shop. The other was a small brewery with big glass windows and taps that had been shattered across the bar. Behind me was a breakfast spot, and directly across from that was a taco joint I had been in before…but just once.

It was the night before everything got locked down—our last meal out in the wild before the whole city was overtaken. We didn’t talk the entire meal. We just kept looking at our phones while the world fell apart. Footage of more attacks, more denials, and more people bragging about how they had killed one with their bare hands. That, I knew, was bullshit. Anyone who had encountered these knew you couldn’t take them barehanded.

When we finished eating, Addy had me drive past the park, where she liked to take weekend walks. It was as if she knew it would be the last time she saw it. We stepped out of the car into the parking lot as the sun set, but then we heard the screams from the woods.

I tried to call 9-1-1, but the line was busy.

That’s when we knew the world was ending.

We took the backstreets home. Every car and house was like a circus, as people either boarded themselves inside or loaded everyone into their cars. We could hear children and parents screaming at each other as the radio told us to find shelter or evacuate the city. I wondered what had happened to all those people who tried to drive out of town.

When I crossed the street and headed for the bar with the anchor, I got my answer.

I kept myself against the wall of the bar, bathed in blue light from the anchor that hung overhead. I looked out over the highway and saw an ocean of cars, all with their doors open and windows smashed, jammed into every available spot on the roads.

I hoped that they had made it out, that everyone had just realized that the cars were making it worse and that they had marched out of the city with their heads held high and not a tear in their eyes.

I looked out past the cars to the surrounding buildings downtown. The skyscrapers were all dark. I could see flickers of light in the city, but I couldn’t tell if they were fires or if they were other people like me moving in the dark because they felt safer.

I thought about walking toward the lights and finding other survivors, other people I could lead to the baseball field.

I took a step forward, my body pushing me to go find the other lost souls. But I didn’t get far.

A gun barrel was pressed to the back of my head.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” a voice whispered.

TO BE CONTINUED!