Ravage: An Apocalyptic Horror Novel(63)

Garden gnomes from Hell.

Through the open doorway up ahead, Ripley Hall’s foyer was now overly-lit, what with the sun now fully risen and reflecting off the tiles. It made it hard to see anything inside in detail.

Mike moved up beside her. “What do you see?” he whispered.

“Nothing. I think it’s safe. I’m going to head up and close the doors.”

“I’ll watch your back.”

Annaliese gripped her steel pole tightly and made her way forward. She listened out intently as she took each step, ready for the first sign of danger. As she got closer, the odour of blood wafted over her. The stench of rot and open gut-wounds had taken over the building. She was grateful she didn’t have to go inside.

She placed a foot onto the front steps of the house and put herself in the open doorway. She could hear the infected milling about in the depths of the building, but the foyer seemed empty.

They must all be upstairs where I led them.

Good.

She reached forward for the door handle. She imagined a spark of electricity as she wrapped her hand around it, but there was none. She had the handle in her grasp and now all she had to do was close the door.

“Look out,” Mike shouted.

Annaliese stumbled backwards off the steps as a woman lurched out of the foyer and collapsed on top of her. It was the maid. The one she had tied up with the keyboard at the reception desk. Now the keyboard swung from the woman’s neck, banging against her hip like a weird purse. The cord wrapped around her neck was frayed from where it had snapped free of the desk.

Annaliese forced herself to stay calm. The maid was no longer erratic and wild; she was slow and clumsy. The cord around her neck had throttled the life out of her and now she had become one of the stumbling dead. Her flesh was grey and mottled, just like the hanging businessman that Shawcross had shown her in the kitchen pantry.

She shrugged loose of the maid’s uncoordinated grasp and stepped backwards.

“Get away from her,” Mike urged.

“I got this.” She gripped her steel pole with both hands. Her injured pinkie finger cried out in pain.

As the maid stumbled towards her, moaning and grasping at thin air, Annaliese brought the pole up over her shoulder. Then she shoved it forward like a pike. The tip entered over the dead maid’s heart and sent her reeling backwards on her heels. Annaliese put her weight behind the pole and shoved harder. She cringed at the wet, sucking sound it made, but was surprised by how easily the steel passed through flesh – dead flesh.

The woman didn’t go down. She clawed and grasped at Annaliese, even with the steel pole through her chest. It was as if the eviscerating wound failed to even register.

Annaliese yanked on the pole and tried to retrieve it, but it was stuck. The blood and leaking organs must have caused an airtight seal. It was clear that the chest wound was not sufficient to put an end to the maid. Now she had no weapon to inflict an additional killing blow. She did have control over the woman, though, via the steel pole jutting out of her chest like a lever.

As the dead woman struggled and writhed on the end of the pole, unable to get free, Annaliese had an idea. Mike rushed up to help her, but she put a hand up to tell him to stay back. Then she returned both hands to the pole and shoved it upwards sharply. The maid went staggering backwards. Then she shoved the pole downwards, towards the ground.

The spike hit the mud and broke the surface, delving into the turgid soil beneath. Annaliese bore down on the pole, shoving it deeper and deeper into the earth. The maid fell onto her back, the metal shaft running right through her chest and into the ground. With one last push, Annaliese forced the pole deep enough into the mud to anchor the woman down permanently. The pole still jutted out the maid’s chest by a good two feet, long enough to prevent her from pulling herself free.

Annaliese stepped away, huffing and puffing. Her palms flared in pain, a layer of skin shorn away by her struggle with the pole. The maid lay pinned to the ground, reaching up at her and snatching at the air. Her moans were distorted by the steel passing through her lungs and came out as a tinny vibrato.

Mike stepped up to the woman and raised his shovel above his head.

“Don’t,” said Annaliese. “I’m seen enough blood spilt for one day. Just leave her there. She isn’t going anywhere.”

Mike looked at Annaliese for a moment, as if he didn’t understand, but then, slowly, he lowered the shovel and shoved it down into the dirt, deep enough that he was able to leave it standing up on its own.

Annaliese headed back up the steps to Ripley Hall and carefully closed the front doors. The sound of the lock catching was like an audible victory, one that had been quite easily achieved if she was honest. She had expected worse.

Am I getting used to this?

The thought worried her; that she might no longer be frightened of monsters, and was now ready to face them in a calm and pragmatic manner. She wondered if it meant she was becoming a monster herself. If she had adapted this quickly in a matter of hours, she dreaded to think what would become of her if the situation continued for an extended length of time. A Nietzsche quote from her college reading days popped into her head.

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

“I don’t see any more of them around,” Mike said. “Not even the one we were looking out for. Where did he go?