“Mommy’s staying with you.”
“Why are people screaming outside?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“Is it because of those monsters? We learned about them in school. Mr. Pilcher protects us from them.”
“I don’t know what they are, Jessica, but I have to go make sure you and Mommy are safe, okay?”
The little girl nodded.
“I love you, sweetheart.”
“I love you too, Daddy.”
He stood, put his hands on his wife’s face. Couldn’t see her in the darkness, but he could feel her lips trembling, the wetness of tears running over them.
He said, “You have water, food, a flashlight.” He tried to make a joke out of it. “Even a pot to piss in.”
She grabbed his neck, put her lips to his ear.
“Don’t do this.”
“There’s no other way and you know it.”
“The basement—”
“It won’t work. The boards are too long to go across the door.” He heard their neighbors, the Millers, dying in their home across the street. “When it comes time to get out—”
“You’ll break us out.”
“I want nothing more. But if I’m not here to do it, use the crowbar. You’ll have to wedge it into the jamb.”
“We should’ve stayed with the others.”
“I know, but we didn’t, and now we’re doing the best we can. No matter what you hear in this bedroom, you stay in this closet, and you don’t make a sound. Cover her ears if—”
“Don’t say that.”
“If what, Daddy?”
“Oh God, don’t say that.”
“I love you, my girls. Now I have to shut this door.”
“No, Daddy!”
“Quiet, Jess,” he whispered.
Jim Turner kissed his wife.
He kissed his daughter.
Then he shut them into the bedroom closet on the second floor of their lavender-colored Victorian.
His toolbox was already open on the floor.
He flicked on his flashlight and chose a suitable two-by-four from the pieces of scrap lumber he’d carried in from the shed—remnants of a doghouse he’d built last summer.
Those warm afternoons working in the backyard . . .
Mrs. Miller’s screaming jettisoned the memory into oblivion.
“No-no-no-no-no-no-no! Oh Goooooooddddd!”
Jessica was crying in the closet, Gracie struggling to comfort her.
Jim grabbed a hammer. He started nails on each end of the board. Screws would have been preferable but there was no time. He held the pine board across the doorframe and drove the nails into the studs.
His mind wouldn’t stop.
He kept replaying what the sheriff had said, but he couldn’t wrap his head around it.
How could this be all that was left of humanity?
By the time he had four boards nailed across the doorframe, the Millers had gone quiet across the street.
He dropped the hammer, wiped his brow.Dripping with sweat.
Kneeling down, he put his lips to the closet door.
“Jessica? Gracie?”
“I can hear you,” his wife said.
“You’re nailed in,” Jim said. “Now I have to go find a place to hide.”
“Please be safe.”
He put his hand on the door.
“I love you both so much.”
Gracie said something back but he couldn’t hear the words. Too muffled. Too faint. Too ruined by tears.
Rising to his feet, he grabbed the flashlight and the hammer—the nearest thing to a weapon in his toolbox.
At the bedroom door, he turned the lock and closed it gently behind him.
The hallway was dark.
The last half hour had been so filled with shouting and shrieks that the silence struck him wrong, like a lie.
Where will you hide?
How will you survive?
He stopped at the top of the staircase. He was tempted to use the light, but feared it might draw attention.
With a hand on the bannister for a guide, he went slowly down the creaking steps. The living room stood in impenetrable shadow. Jim moved to the front door. He’d locked the dead bolt, but he had a feeling that didn’t matter. From what he’d seen, these things were running through the windows.
Stay inside?
Go?
On the other side of the door, he heard something scrape.
Leaned into the peephole.
There were no streetlamps working, but he could actually see outside, the pavement and the picket fences and the cars just faintly illuminated by residual starlight.
Three of those things were crawling up the flagstones that led from the picket fence to the front door.
He’d caught glimpses of them streaking down the street from his second-floor bedroom window, but he hadn’t yet seen one up close.
None of them were larger than he was, but their muscle tone was extraordinary.
They looked—
Like humanity wrapped in the trappings of a monster.
Equipped with talons instead of fingers, teeth designed for cutting and tearing, and they brandished arms that seemed too long in proportion to the rest of their body. Longer even than their legs.
He said under his breath, like a prayer, “What the hell are you?”
They reached the porch.
Fear suddenly wore him like a glove.
He backed away from the door, moving through the dark again, between the sofa and the coffee table, and then into the kitchen, where the starlight filtered through the window over the sink just sufficiently to brighten the linoleum and light the way.
Jim set the hammer on the counter and took the back-door key off the nail beside the door.
Something crashed into the front door as he worked the key into the lock.
A wood-splintering, lock-rattling collision.
He turned the key, the dead bolt retracting.
Ripped open the back door as the front door punched open.
The steps leading up to the second floor, to the bedroom, to the closet where his girls were in hiding would be the first thing those monsters saw.
Jim walked several steps back into the kitchen, and said, “Hey, guys? Over here!”
An eardrum-riving shriek filled the house.
He couldn’t see a thing, but he heard those creatures slamming through tables and chairs as they came for him. He tore back through the kitchen, shutting the door after him and launching down the single step into his perfect square of grass.