The Night Has Teeth: Chapter 9

John and the "owner" of the bar confront each other about the safety of the women and children inside.

Chapter 9

I let the man from the bar slip out in front of me and onto the street. Everything was dark and quiet, but I knew those things were out there. I could feel it.

“Stay low,” he whispered to me.

I held the gun tightly in my hand, but the sweat from my palm was making it difficult to hold on. It didn’t matter if I thought I was doing the right thing. Suppose I was liberating women and children from a monster who was lording safety over them. The fact of the matter is, if I couldn’t take him out quietly, I would alert every one of the flesh-ripping bastards within a mile radius.

“I’m glad I found you,” he said.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I gripped my handgun tighter but lowered it a little.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“It was getting hard to keep everyone in check, you know?” he said. “It’s not enough to be the man in charge…you’ve got to remind people of it. You gotta show them that there’s consequences if you don’t follow the rules.”

I wanted to give him a witty comeback. It's something cool that would make me feel like all the heroes I grew up watching in movies. I would say something like, “You’re about to get your own consequences,” but that would make an audience stand up and cheer for me. Then, I would triumphantly walk out of town towards the baseball field, kiss Addy deeply, and ascend onto a helicopter as the military swooped in to save us.

But there was no audience. It was real life.

I pistol-whipped the man as hard as I could against the back of his skull. The reverberation of bone followed its way up the magazine in my gun to my sweaty palms and fingers.

The man stumbled and felt the back of his head. His fingers came back slick with blood, and it looked almost dark and purple in the light of the blue anchor sign above him.

“What the fuck?” he said.

He turned his gun on me and fired.

BANG.

A shot went through the bar window and cracked the glass.

I dropped to the pavement and opened fire.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

Two shots went wide, but the third caught the man in the shoulder and knocked him to the pavement.

At first, I could only hear my heartbeat in my ears. The surge of adrenaline had me back on my feet and standing over the man as I took his gun from him and pressed my foot down on his shoulder.

He screamed and howled in pain as he tried to reach for it.

“Why?!” he screamed. “Why the fuck would you do this?! We’re on the same side!”

“No,” I said, “we’re not.”

That’s when the silence of the night was cut in two by the claws and jaws of pale, mutated men and women leaping from the rooftops and under surrounding cars.

I didn’t move. Instead, I slowed my breathing and tried to be as quiet as possible. I stared into the man’s eyes as he looked up at me with terror.

“You fucking traitor!” he screamed.

His body was pulled out from under my boot like a battered rug. They swarmed him from every angle as they bit into the side of his head, his arms, his legs, and his stomach. They pulled him apart like children fighting over a stuffed animal, and in the dark, I watched as his blood, dark as the night, stained the sidewalk under the blue light of the neon anchor.

He was still staring at me with the one eye he had left. The pale ones were chewing and gnawing on the meat they had pulled from his bones, not paying even an ounce of attention to me as I stood perfectly still.

One of them bumped me as it made its way towards the man’s corpse. Adrenaline filled my body from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head, but I fought every instinct to run. It only turned and howled at me like it had stubbed its toe. It didn’t care about someone being silent. It wanted the loud meat. The meat that had been screaming and vibrating the air for the past few minutes.

As I turned my attention back to the dead man’s eye, I realized that I didn’t even know his name. He never thought to give it, and I never thought to ask. Part of me wondered if it was because I didn’t want to know the name of a monster. That taking care of him, nameless, was easier. But deep down, I knew the real reason was that it didn’t matter. Names didn’t matter anymore. There wasn’t a reason to meet a stranger and exchange the monikers that our parents had given us at birth. Our parents were dead. Our legacies were dead. And now, our names were dying, too.

I took a gentle step backward.

The creatures continued to feast.

I turned around and softly walked back into the bar. The women and children were huddled at the back, all holding each other and being silent.

I gave them a soft nod, but they all looked at me with the same disdain and cold eyes that they had given the previous man. I had hoped they’d be grateful, at least a knowing nod. But again, I was fooling myself. Heroes had names, and names didn’t matter anymore. I hadn’t been the stranger who comes into town and saves the day. I had just been another man, perpetuating violence and sharing it with the world. They knew this, and I didn’t deserve to be rewarded for it.

I pulled the door until the latch caught, then turned and crept down the street like a kid on Christmas morning.

Ahead of me was the mess of cars that led to the industrial parks, and behind me was another sad story about the ones who prey on others.

TO BE CONTINUED!

Afterword

Hey friends! If you’re enjoying this rough draft of my first novel in quite some time, please leave a comment below and let me know how you like the story so far!

Also, feel free to throw any fun predictions, questions, etc.

All are welcome!