This Place Is Dead

The pale blue moonlight bathed Greywood Courtyard in ethereal brushstrokes.

Darell Porter eased the back door to 13B shut, a dull click as the latch caught. In his hands, he held his DIY weapon. A broom with a six-inch butcher’s knife secured to the end of the handle. A bundle of string and duct tape bound the blade to the tip. He’d used too much, but he’d rather it be too secure than not secure enough.

From the opposite side of the yard came the rattle of metal. Snarls and grunts. The clink of a chain. Something scraped and slapped against the concrete.

He had to be quick. Before it got free.

The lights bloomed overhead, their sensors triggered by him or the late-night guest. Darell prayed that it had stumbled into their blockade by accident. And on its own. If more than one had gotten themselves stuck, he would be in for trouble.

He crept toward the quad’s northeast exit, his shadow thick and black against the ground. To his right, the square of damp grass lay, the dew on the blades motionless. The green scent licked the back of his nose and throat, in juxtaposition with what would soon happen. Darell skirted around the outside of the patch. His footsteps tap-tap-tapped upon the concrete.

He passed the northwest alley, which lay between his building to the west and the one to the north. He glanced into its motionless gloom. Empty. Nothing twitched or shuffled. Darell sent silent praise to whoever looked down from above. If, indeed, some deity occupied the heavens. As of late, Darell wasn’t so sure. A row of trolleys — pilfered from the supermarket one kilometre away — strung across the exit’s neck. A Spar-sponsored garrote. Fingers crossed they would never figure out how the coin-operated locks worked. Darell couldn’t imagine they would, but you had to prepare yourself for anything.

Building 13C loomed above, its glass face dark. Good. That was good. It meant the thing caught in the barricade — bicycles chained together — hadn’t followed a light. Like a guiding star from some cannibalistic twist on the biblical tale. No noise whispered from 13C, its windows all closed despite the hot evening. Nobody wanted to risk it — even if they didn’t live on the ground.

A solitary face looked down at him from the third or fourth floor. A white countenance, wrinkled and aged. Old Mrs Hurlbutt. One hand held the curtains to the side, the other clutched her necklace. Her eyes — black in the dusk — followed him across the courtyard. Mrs Hurlbutt’s lips moved, silent. Was she praying for him? Well, Darell wasn’t so sure if there was a god, but he’d take all the goodwill he could get. He nodded to her as he passed, but couldn’t muster the smile he gave her under usual circumstances. Not that you could call anything these days usual circumstances.

He rounded the corner to northeast alley. Glints of metal in the lamps’ yellow glow. White-blue reflections of the moonlight. Shadows smothered each other. Something twitched and fought in the tenebrosity. A flail of limbs — an ensnared animal. Only this was no hare.

Darell edged forward, the makeshift spear held before him like some stone-age remnant. His tongue darted from one corner of his mouth to the other, his lower lip slaked with saliva.

The row of bicycles still held, the end ones locked to a staircase and a side door. Those in the middle dipped beneath the weight of the trapped creature. Wireframes strained.

Just the one.

Darell eased out a part of his held breath but didn’t release all the tension. An easier job than it could have been, but not an easy job. It wouldn’t do to get complacent. He knew that better than anybody — he often said so to the apartment complex’s other tenants. Still, it was easy to lower your guard when someone else volunteered to stand on duty. A task that Darell took on with relative ease. What was it his mother had always told him? If you want something done right, do it yourself.

All four buildings of the Greywood Apartment Complex remained casualty free. As did the central courtyard. Something that Darell took great pride in. He’d kept his people safe, and, what’s more, he’d kept Greywood clean. No corpses, on-fire cars, or waves of litter. Unlike the streets outside. As the only one who braved the city beyond, he’d seen how bad things could get.

He stole closer to the tangled mess. It writhed on the ground, hands stretched out towards him. It had gotten its leg caught in the spokes of a wheel before it tottered over to the other side. The ankle had snapped with the creature’s weight. The foot wrapped around the metal spine. Now, it lay on the Greywood side of the barricade, anchored in place by its mangled limb.

A wounded howl.

It had spotted him.

The creature twitched and snaked across the concrete, its hands used as paddles. It reached for Darell. Its fingers grasped the space between them. Hungry. Desperate. Needy. The thing’s jaw clicked together, in anticipation of the meal-to-come.

Darell had to be quick. Quick and careful.

The sound would attract more. It always did — no matter the source or the type. Gunshots, screams, music. Even the bangs and groans they made drew others out of the woodwork. Like a choir. Strange to say, but they seemed sociable creatures. If you ignored their interactions with uninfected humans.

Darell tiptoed forward. At this distance, the stench of rotten flesh hit him like a truck. He gasped and clenched his mouth shut. Tried to breathe through his nose, and found that didn’t help much. The gap between them narrowed enough for him to see that it had once been a woman. A woman with red hair, if he trusted the yard’s lamps. That never helped — to see them as the people they’d been. Easier to think of them as creatures. Darell wanted to keep a firm grip on his ability to fall asleep at night.

From side to side she scurried, her hands arched against the white floor. Eerie how fast they adapted to different forms of ambulation. Quicker than humans. Darell guessed they repurposed the neurons for speech and cognition.

She tugged at her stuck leg and shrieked again. Fast. He had to be fast. He didn’t want others to come. And he didn’t want Red to rip her foot off to get free. She’d be harder to deal with, that way.

Darell sucked in a breath and crouched — a coiled spring. He readjusted his grip on the broom’s handle, spun it through his sweat-wet fingers. The blade glinted in the blue moonlight, reflected it off the walls between Greywood 13C and D.

When the opening came, Darell Porter pounced.