Last Chance--A Novel Read online

  Rocky and Kris parked our empty wheelbarrows beside the two left by Ben’s crew. We breezed through the fence, lifting our feet carefully so as not to jangle the chain-link. Then we huddled up behind the rows of Dumpsters.

  Ben’s guys had already forged into the grocery store through the rolled-up door of the loading bay. We crossed the asphalt, climbed onto the dock, and slipped inside. Ben had left the door open for us. We found him and his crew in the back room, which was rimmed with freezers.

  The doorway to the main floor was covered with dangling plastic strips. Terror bubbled up in me as I saw them bulge inward at us. They fell away, revealing Mikey steering a flatbed cart into the room.

  I exhaled shakily. Ben’s dark eyes found me. “Feeling jumpy, Little Rain?”

  “You’d be an idiot not to,” Alex said.

  Ben rested his hand against the door of the nearest freezer unit. “Still cool,” he said. “This bad boy’s never been popped.”

  Mikey moved the cart close, and Ben opened the door. The freezer was packed with cuts of meat. Ben rubbed his hands together to warm them; it made him look like a cartoon robber about to plunder a bank.

  His guys started stacking vacuum-sealed cutlets, chops, and fillets onto the flatbed. Ben looked up at my brother and jerked his head toward the plastic curtain. “Roll out.”

  Our job was to secure the main floor and load up on nonperishables.

  We pressed through. The plastic dragged across my face, falling away to reveal the main floor. It was chilly—the front doors had been breached by Hosts way back at the beginning.

  Patrick signaled for us to break up between the aisles as we’d discussed. We split off in twos to complete our various tasks. Mine and Patrick’s was to deal with the shattered sliding front doors.

  Rocky and Eve started grabbing armloads of Cheerios, crackers, and energy bars. Jenny and Kris peeled down the aisle toward canned goods. Alex stayed alone in the back. We’d said that her job was to provide overwatch, but it was really to keep an eye on Ben and his crew.

  Patrick and I eased our way to the front of the store. The night wind whipped back my hair. Despite the cold, I armed sweat from my forehead.

  We reached the sliding doors. One of them had been smashed in by the Hosts, but the other was intact. The doors were made of heavy-duty Lexan. Jack Kaner had installed them last July after an F2 tornado ripped through and turned all his windows to slivers of glass.

  As I stared across the parking lot, I felt my heartbeat revving up, a thump-thump-thump at my wrists and the sides of my neck. Town square was barely visible beyond the lot, a lake of black framed by the blocky shadows of the hospital, the church, the One Cup Cafe.

  A body lay at the edge of visibility, either a rotting teenage kid or a dead Host. It was twisted grotesquely, as if it had landed there from some great height, the torso jackknifed back over the hips, arms splayed. I wondered how it had happened.

  When Patrick tapped my shoulder, I jumped.

  He pointed at the emergency metal gates tucked into the wall at either side of the doorway. We gave a last scan of the parking lot and then leaned our weapons against the wall and set to work. I dug my hand into the crevice on the left side and hooked the handle at the end of the gate.

  It expanded outward with a screech.

  I froze. Bit my lip. My eyes were scrunched shut against the noise. I pictured it rolling across the parking lot, town square, the whole stupid valley, and echoing back from Ponderosa Pass fifty miles away.

  I looked behind me at Patrick. His eyes were wide, his Stetson cocked back on his head. He eased a breath out through his teeth and made a calming gesture with his hands: Slower.

  He grabbed the gate handle on his side of the doorway and extracted it one painstaking inch at a time. Rather than screeching, it made a grinding noise. Patrick eased off the pressure even more, and the grinding slowed to a series of metallic ticks as the rusty hinges accordioned open.

  I followed his lead, guiding the other side of the gate out to meet his in the middle.

  I felt exposed there in the open mouth of the store, my whole right side laid bare to wind and darkness. But I forced myself to move as slowly as I could.

  As the gate stretched open, my side of it would give a tick, and a few seconds later Patrick’s would. It sounded like a clock winding down.

  We backed up toward each other. At last I felt my brother’s shoulder blades bump into mine. An industrial-size padlock dangled from the metal loop, and Patrick freed it. I fastened the thick hasp, and he hooked the padlock through, clicked it, and extracted the key.

  When he exhaled, his shoulders lowered a solid inch. He stepped away from the doorway, picked up his shotgun, and turned to face me.

  He whispered, “Now let’s—”

  He read my face and stopped.

  My mouth had gone bone-dry. A sheen of panic sweat covered my body—it had sprung up instantly. My throat clutched. I couldn’t force out a single word.

  I didn’t have to.

  Slowly, Patrick turned his head toward the window just behind him.

  On the far side of the pane, no more than six inches away, nostril holes quivered and blew twinning plumes of mist against the glass.

  Eyelids flickered over bulging black pupils. Even in the darkness, the orange hue of the flesh was clear. The mouth parted as I dreaded it would.

  And kept parting.

  Jagged teeth stretched wide, each one tapering to a gleaming, pearly point.

  The Hatchling reared back and launched himself into the window.

  ENTRY 37

  The Hatchling hit the pane with the violence of a head-on train wreck. The collision threw off a warbling noise with resonance I felt in my bones, so loud I cringed and ducked at the same time, as if either would help. The Hatchling reeled back a step, his feet scraping against the pavement. He squared to us again, gathered himself up, and then beat against the Lexan, leaving streaks of orange mucus laced with blood. He kept going. Claws. Elbows. That horrid face, smeared against the pane.

  It was so terrifying it took a moment for me to register what was happening. The tornado-resistant Lexan glass had held. Unlike the sliding front doors, which could come unhoused from their tracks, the windows were secured solidly in their frames.

  For now it was like watching him from the safety of an aquarium.

  Not that that helped calm me down any.

  The breeze shifted, blowing the fetid smell through the bars of the gate. My gorge rose and soured the back of my mouth.

  Patrick and I stepped away from the window.

  “Oh, my God,” Jenny White said from somewhere behind us. “That’s not real. That can’t be real.”

  We tore our eyes from the flailing spectacle, looking behind us. Rocky, Eve, Kris, Jenny, and Alex had stepped into view from various aisles, staring in disbelief.

  Alex said, “Will the gate hold?”

  “Solid steel,” Patrick said. “It’s as strong as the Lexan.”

  The Hatchling seemed to be hammering the glass in fast-forward. Ropes of blood painted the window. Claws scoured the Lexan. His head struck the pane again and again. It was like he couldn’t believe he couldn’t break through. For a moment I wondered if he might beat himself to death against it.

  But then he pulled back from the window. He staggered a few steps and straightened himself up. He turned to the parking lot.

  He released a high-pitched whistle. Steam vented from hidden glands ringing his neck, misting in the air around his head so it looked like a lion’s mane. He was pushing the noise out of himself with such force that he doubled over from the exertion.

  Inside the Piggly Wiggly, we clamped our hands over our ears.

  Ben and Dezi spilled through the back door.

  “What the hell is going—” Ben froze.

  I’d never seen fear on his face before. I’d never seen him even approximate the expression he was wearing now. His face seemed to flatten out, the skin pulled wide
, broadening the scars. It made him look so young—I could recognize the kid he used to be before the car crash.

  Mikey stuck his head through the plastic curtain. He blinked twice at the sight and then withdrew. I can’t say I blamed him.

  Dezi hobbled forward. “Kill him,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the Hatchling. “Patrick—shoot that thing!”

  But Patrick knew as well as I that there was no point. The rock salt wouldn’t penetrate the Lexan any more than the Hatchling could. And Patrick couldn’t fire through the locked gates covering the front entrance; half the pellets would ricochet off the steel bars and wind up embedded in his own face.

  At last the Hatchling finished his cry. He drew himself back upright.

  An instant of silence. And then the faintest rumbling.

  “What’s that noise?” Kris said, his voice slowed with shock.

  At the outer edges of the parking lot, bounding through the mist, came the answer.

  Four of them.

  Six.

  No—ten.

  A pack of Hatchlings, called in for the kill as sure as coyotes answering their leader’s howl.

  And it hit me. We were in an aquarium, all right. On the wrong side of the glass.

  The Hatchlings bounded toward us, dipping low like apes as they neared. And then they leapt.

  They hammered the Lexan like a volley of cannonballs, the force great enough to shudder the walls of the grocery store.

  They bounced back and rose again, shaking themselves off.

  They came once more, a second wave of attack. This time they leapt above the Lexan panes. We heard the crunch of claws sinking into stucco. For a peaceful instant, they were gone from sight. The front of the grocery store and the parking lot looked as desolate and quiet as ever.

  Then we heard the sets of claws pulling free. Punching back in.

  Moving upward.

  “What are they doing?” Rocky asked.

  “Maybe…” Ben coughed to clear his throat. “Maybe they’re going away.”

  Now came a moaning of the ceiling beams. Plaster fell from above, fine as silt. We stared up with dread. A few bits trickled down onto Rocky’s shoulder.

  There came a terrible scrabbling sound. Claws grinding.

  Digging.

  Ben walked backward down the aisle, retreating toward the freezer room a single slow-motion step at a time. Dezi limped after him. All I saw was their necks, the underbelly of their chins. My gaze shot north again. We couldn’t take our eyes off the ceiling. We stayed still and quiet, as if that could make us disappear.

  Kris whispered, “Are they really gonna—”

  A Hatchling crashed through the roof, shooting down in a shower of wood and plaster. He plummeted, positioned like a swooping hawk, claws leading the way. He landed directly on top of Kris, shredding him to pieces before his body even struck the floor. The Hatchling didn’t land on a body. He landed in a pool of what the body used to be.

  We all watched, stunned. The floor where Kris had been was a Cuisinart mess.

  The Hatchling lifted his head, his mouth stained Joker red. The rest of his skin morphed into different shades matching the colorful labels on the shelves around him.

  Then he leapt six yards, landing on top of Jenny White. It was like some awful checkers move. The Hatchling’s sewage reek permeated the store. And the smell of torn-open flesh.

  Another crash rent the ceiling behind Alex. Then a spot of roof gave way over in the dairy section. Another by the fruit bins. Rotten apples rolled across the tile every which way.

  The Hatchlings rocketed down through the roof like bungee jumpers with the cords cut.

  Ben screamed. It was too high-pitched to be called a yell—it was an out-and-out scream, shot through with the purest terror I’d ever heard. The sound sent a wash of pins and needles over my skin.

  And got me moving.

  I ran at the Hatchling feasting on Jenny and sank my baling hook into the top of his head. The hole smoked around the steel tip, the salt water doing its trick.

  The Hatchling craned his head around toward me, his lips spread in a piercing cry. The force of his neck muscles was almost enough to wrench the hook from my hand. He tried to swipe at me, but I tugged the hook free and jumped back.

  He fell on the floor, seizing.

  Jenny had died as fast as Kris, her body unrecognizable except for the clotted mass of long brown hair.

  I sprinted for Rocky and Eve in the next aisle.

  As I rounded the endcap, Patrick hip-checked me out of the way, sending me flying. I caught an upside-down view of him standing in the precise spot where I’d been an instant before, unloading the shotgun directly up into the ceiling.

  The rock salt tore the plummeting Hatchling to pieces. Chunks of flesh and spatter rained down all around us. A glob hit my bare forearm, stinging my flesh before I shook it free.

  I rolled onto my feet, came up behind Patrick.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  We bolted around the corner and up the last aisle, where Rocky and Eve stood stunned and speechless. Past them at the end, Alex maintained a wide stance, her hockey stick raised.

  A rotund female Hatchling had landed between her and the door to the freezer room. Alex stared past the Hatchling at Ben and Dezi on the far side.

  The rest of the Hatchlings filled the store behind us, cutting off all other routes. But if we could get through this female, we could escape out the back.

  “Distract her, and I’ll hit her with the stick!” Alex shouted to Ben and Dezi.

  Ben’s chest heaved. He tried to step back but tripped over his shoes and fell. He got up, one hand held out, shaking. He gripped the stun gun.

  “That won’t work,” Alex said. “Not on them.”

  Ben’s wild eyes found her. “I’m sorry, Alex,” he said, his voice cracking.

  He turned and ran for the freezer room.

  “Wait!” Alex shouted. “We need numbers! Get back here!”

  Dezi followed Ben, slowed by his bad knee. As he hustled toward the freezer room, he favored one side so heavily that it looked like he was skipping.

  The female ran after him. Her claws made a terrible grinding sound against the tile. Dezi tried to run faster. His bad knee folded beneath him. He staggered.

  The female reached him.

  We didn’t see it so much as hear it.

  Wet thrashing. Screams. Ripping skin.

  Ben reached the plastic curtain. He paused, turned back to look at us. The strips cascaded down across his shoulders, rustling against his clothes. He looked directly at me and Patrick. His cheeks glistened with tears. His face shifted, something showing through the fear.

  Something like remorse.

  He vanished through the plastic curtain. The metal door behind it banged closed. A dead bolt slammed home.

  He’d locked the Hatchlings in here. With us.

  We could hear the others bulling through the store, closing in.

  Alex came up behind the female and hammered her with the hockey stick. The female grunted and rolled off what was left of Dezi. Alex pressed the blade to her throat and leaned all her weight onto it.

  A sizzle as the salt coating scorched through the Hatchling’s flesh. The salamander-orange head nodded to one side, nearly severed. Alex followed up with a slap shot that sent the head tumbling through the air, denting the metal door on impact.

  Patrick and I corralled Rocky and Eve, rushing them toward Alex and the freezer room beyond. Alex kicked the female’s body aside, clearing the aisle for us, and started for the plastic curtain.

  We got only a few steps when two Hatchlings skidded into sight around the aisle’s end. They lost their footing, smashing into the shelves of rotten milk. As they popped back onto their feet, their skin transformed from milk white to its native orange. They were quickly joined by a third.

  We spun around to run to the front of the store. It was clear. I coughed out a single not
e of relief.

  As we started racing toward freedom, Patrick pulled up first, spreading an arm to hold us back.

  “Wait,” he said.

  He was staring intently at the displays before the cash registers.

  Sure enough, they blurred and came to life, bipedal forms peeling away from their backdrops.

  As the camouflage faded, four Hatchlings resolved into 3-D. We’d nearly sprinted right into them.

  Shoulder to shoulder, they started toward us.

  The three Hatchlings behind us advanced as well.

  The noose, tightening fast.

  ENTRY 38

  Patrick fired at the group of four Hatchlings. Rock salt glanced off their flesh, leaving smoking spots of black. The Hatchlings hissed at us but didn’t drop.

  “Why isn’t it working?” Rocky said.

  “We’re not close enough to break skin,” Patrick said.

  “What do we do?”

  Patrick shrugged and shuck-shucked the shotgun. “Let them get closer.”

  “I’m not wild about that idea,” Alex said.

  We backed into one another, an outward-facing huddle. The aisle sign swayed overhead: MILK & DAIRY.

  An idea swirled around the panic typhoon in my head, and finally I managed to grab hold of it.

  I broke apart from the others, setting my shoulder blades against the glass-fronted refrigerator units. “Hold them off,” I said. “I have a plan.”

  “What are you doing, Chance?” Eve shouted. “Get back here!”

  I launched off the glass doors and hurled myself into the rise of shelves opposite. Loaves of bread spilled down, pummeling my head. But I felt the base of the unit give a bit.

  I drew back and hurtled at the bakery shelves again. They tilted up. I shoved into them like a football player driving into a workout sled.

  The shelves toppled.

  Not the whole aisle of course, just that section.

  It crashed into Condiments & Sauces.

  “Follow me!” I yelled, vaulting a raft of tumbling baguettes, scaling the rise even as it fell.

  Patrick got off a blast in either direction, driving back the Hatchlings a few steps. My brother and the other kids clambered after me.