What Once We Feared (2 page)

But then I saw where his sleeve was torn and how he held his hand against his stomach. There was blood. A
lot
of blood.

It’s not like he could think we wouldn’t see it, and for a second he had a guilty look on his face. Almost panicked, even. But then he must have remembered that he was an adult and we were just a bunch of teenagers, because he pushed past us and strode down the dim hallway, his keys rattling in his bloody fingers.

And it worked. We stood there like dumb kids and let him do what he wanted, because seriously, who were we to stop him?

Then, to add to our stupefied uselessness, the elevator doors began to slide closed and I couldn’t get there in time to stop them. I started pounding the button, trying to call it back. The call light lit up, but I was too late. Behind the double doors, the engine hummed and wires whisked the little cage back down into the building.

There would be more coming—more people. More infected. I’d locked the garage down, but they could still get into the Overlook through the office. We wouldn’t stay safe for long if that happened. We had to stop them. Any way we could, we had to keep anyone else from getting up to the penthouse.

We had to stop the elevators from running.

I closed my eyes, trying to concentrate, but every thought was shrouded in a red-tinged panic. “How many elevators are there?”

Nicky didn’t answer and I turned to face her. “How many?” I asked again, and she kind of flinched as though my words had been physical.

“Just these two,” she finally answered. “Why?”

Behind the metal doors I heard the cables whirring, from the bowels of the building, floor chimes rang one after another, growing louder. Other people were filing into the building. Like water rising, they would get to us eventually if we didn’t find a way to pull the plug.

On the other side of the vestibule a sign for the billiard room hung on the wall next to a set of double doors. I tried the handles but they were locked. “Can you get me in here?”

Nicky’s face was pale, her lips white and dry and the rims of her eyes raw. She was shutting down; my words seemed to be getting trapped in her head in some kind of endless cycle. Instead of answering, she stood there blinking.

Behind her the elevator’s engine hummed. Blood roared through me—that feeling of having the perfect strategy for winning a game and just hoping you have the chance to play it out.

And knowing just how many ways it could all go wrong.

A crisp
ding
sounded, and even though we’d been the ones to call the elevator, its arrival startled us. We turned as one, waiting for the doors to slide open. I braced myself for a monster to come stumbling out and felt almost light-headed when I saw that the car was empty.

Except for the glistening pool of blood oozing along the floor.

“Oh my God,” Beatrice started mumbling over and over. She backed down the hallway, a low wail building in the back of her throat.

“Don’t let it leave!” I called to Gregor as the doors began to slide shut. He had to dive for it, his foot slipping on the blood and his elbow crashing against the wood paneled wall

I turned to Nicky and wrapped my fingers around her shoulders, forcing her to focus. “I need you to get me in that room.”

Her hands shook as she held out the same black electronic key she’d used to access the top floor. I pressed it against the lock and the door opened with a click.

I didn’t care anymore about trying to appear smooth and confident. I only cared about what could be coming in that second elevator. Hearing its ascent, the beep of buttons as it climbed past floor five, then six, then seven. Knowing that eventually someone else with a key to
the top floor would come home, bringing with them more danger.

Those men who’d fallen from the top of the skyscrapers earlier—the ones who’d stayed dead which meant they were probably uninfected—had to have jumped because that was less terrifying than whatever was coming for them. I didn’t want to know what that was. I didn’t want to face it up here in this dim hallway.

As I’d hoped, the billiard room had a few seating arrangements, and I grabbed the closest chair, dragging it over the thick carpet into the hallway. Gregor kept having to battle the elevator doors as they tried to close over and over again. The alarm started to buzz, the sound grating and horrible in what had been almost silence before.

Gregor helped me maneuver the chair into place to block the doors, and then he climbed out, cradling his elbow. “Call the other one,” I told him as I went back for a second chair.

Nicky tried to stop me. “What are you doing?”

I moved around her. With the alarm going I couldn’t hear the cables of the second elevator, couldn’t tell how close it was. “Locking it down.”

“But my dad …” She grabbed my sleeve.

I pulled free. Said nothing. Started dragging another chair out into the hallway.

She jumped in front of me, kneeling on the seat and leaning over the back toward me. “My dad’s still out there,” she argued.

My hands clenched the armrests. I felt the words rising in my throat, pushing against my vocal cords. “Screw your dad!” I wanted to scream in her face, because seriously, what were we supposed to do? Camp out in the hallway and stand guard? Hope that her dad eventually showed up and wasn’t as bloody as the last guy?

Instead, I took a deep breath. “It’s not safe.” How could she not understand?

The other elevator dinged, and even before the doors opened we heard banging and moaning. “Oh crap,” Gregor breathed.

Beatrice took off running down the hallway, and Felipe chased after her. But I didn’t follow. I couldn’t. We had to block the elevator so more of those things didn’t get up here. I
kicked the chair I’d been dragging toward Gregor and then grabbed Nicky, throwing her into the billiard room.

When the elevator doors whisked open, I wasn’t looking. I was racing toward the row of pool cues hanging on the wall.

It was the first time I’d heard the moaning close up and personal. Not filtered through the TV as background noise in a newscast or as part of the panicked stampede out of Uptown earlier.

This was the sound of something that used to be human and was no more. It was the kind of thing that could make your heart stop, your lungs constrict, your nerves shrivel.

Later the sound would become the backdrop to everyday life, the way the hiss of electronics and the buzz of traffic used to be. But not in that moment. Right then, I realized that death had a sound and it was coming for us.

“No, no no no nonononono,” I kept muttering under my breath. I’d had the winning hand here—I’d known how to keep us safe, and this wasn’t part of it.

I swept the pool cues into my arms, hating how flimsy they felt. How in the world could these protect us? Protect me? They’d snap instantaneously. No way could they inflict the damage necessary.

When I got back to the door I saw Gregor in the hallway, holding the chair up like a lion tamer, trying to push back a tall woman in a business suit. One of her sleeves was ripped off and her skirt was twisted. A gash ran the length of her face, flapping open to show her teeth and the bones around her eye. Her hair was drenched with blood. It was still wet, hanging in ropes that splashed against her neck and sent droplets flinging onto the walls and the front of Gregor’s shirt.

I could just close the door
, I thought. My hand curled around the knob. Nicky and I would be safe locked in here. We could survive.

Behind me, Nicky gurgled in panic, and Gregor must have heard, because he glanced up at me. With that one look he knew. I could see it register in his eyes. I was going to abandon him.

Every man for himself
, he was thinking, remembering the way I’d said it earlier.

The thing about decisions is that sometimes you don’t make them for the right reasons. Sometimes you have an idea of yourself that isn’t real. It’s an aspiration; it’s the picture you hold in your mind so that you don’t weep at all of your failings.

In my head, I was the savior. I was the strong one, the guy in charge who could keep us safe. But I knew standing there that that would never be me. Never
could
be me.

In reality, I was the coward. The one so terrified of dying I’d sacrifice anyone and everyone for the chance to keep my own heart beating for just another second.

With that single glance, Gregor knew this truth about me. It was written in the disappointment that shuddered his breathing with the terror-laced understanding that suddenly, he was alone in his fight.

What’s funny is that if I’d just let him die, he’d have taken that knowledge with him. I’d have been safe from his censure. I could have repositioned the mask of competence over my face and stared down the next challenge, hoping not to waver and fall again.

The thing is—I didn’t decide to save Gregor because that’s the kind of guy I am. I tried to save him because I couldn’t stand him knowing the worst of me.

The chair Gregor used as a weapon was heavy and unwieldy. His arms were tiring and his reactions slowing. I leapt into the fight with a pool cue in each hand. My first swipe went wild, snapping against the woman’s shoulder and doing nothing.

“That won’t work!” Gregor screamed.

“I know!” I shouted back.

Images from old kung fu movies flashed in my head, but none of them were long or bright enough for me to capture them and figure out what to do. Behind us, Nicky screamed, “Kill it!” as though somehow that would be helpful.

The woman lurched, her teeth snapping at Gregor’s fingers. He yanked his hand out of reach, dropping one side of the chair in the process. In that second he was unprotected, and the creature lunged.

I tried to use the cue to push her back, but the angles were off. I was only successful at tilting her off balance, and I quickly shoved the other cue between her legs, tripping her.

She fell to the floor with a thump, something somewhere inside her snapping. Already she was pushing herself to her knees. I didn’t know what to do to stop her, so I kicked her in the abdomen, sending her tumbling to the side. Gregor toppled the chair over her, trying to position it so that the crossbars on the legs would pin her down. But it wasn’t working.

She grabbed Gregor’s pants, yanking hard. He lost his footing and fell, his head smashing the wall as his body went limp. The woman flailed, teeth going straight for Gregor’s ankle. Nicky screamed.

If I’d had time maybe I’d have thought to wedge the pool cue in her mouth so she couldn’t bite him. I could have rolled the woman onto her stomach and pinned her arms back while the others figured out a way to tie her up.

But I knew nothing except panic; I tasted its bitterness at the back of my throat, the heat of it searing my neurons so that I couldn’t think. Instead, I just acted out of pure, blind instinct and kicked the woman, hard, in the face.

The year before I’d been the place kicker on the football team. I knew how to kick a ball, how to gather the power in your legs and transfer it out through the top of your foot.

As I felt her teeth rip free and heard her jaw popping, I thought,
This is a woman’s face you’re destroying. A human being you’re attacking
.

Her head snapped back, her moans choked on shards of teeth now lodged in her throat. But that didn’t stop her reaching for Gregor again.

It was like this would never end.

That’s the truth I grasped in that moment and never lost again: this was the beginning. I could kill this woman and there would be another behind her. And another behind that. They would come and come and come and eventually I’d have nothing left in me to fight.

It would never be a question of how long
they
could last; it was all about how long
I
could. And I knew, right then, that I would give up. Not now and perhaps not soon, but at some
point I would have fight left in me, and I would let it go.

Because I wasn’t strong enough for this new world.

In the end, I’m not a survivor.

There was something about embracing my inevitable death, knowing that it would come and it would be my choice, that made it easier to flip the chair over and press the top rail of it against the woman’s throat. She was pinned on her back, facing me, her jaw crooked, her mouth a gaping mess.

Her mascara was smeared, dried grayish tears streaking her cheeks. I assumed she’d died in the elevator, alone. Just trying to go home. Later, when we started breaking into apartments looking for supplies, I’d find hers—a tidy corner unit with views of the mountains. Her furniture was modern, her bathroom a mess, and her kitchen had been that of a woman who loved to cook. Cupboards stuffed full, a refrigerator with the first fresh vegetables we’d had in days. She had only one picture frame on her dresser, and in it was a photo of her and another girl who looked just like her. Probably her sister.

Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to find that sister. To have to confess that that woman was the first human being I’d ever purposefully hurt. She was the first I killed.

And it was terrible and impossible.

As I pressed the rail of the chair against her throat I realized that choking her was useless. Decapitation or destruction of the brain—that’s what we’d been told on the news were the only defenses. And yet, no matter how much weight I put behind it, even when I jumped, trying to add pressure, I couldn’t sever her neck. I couldn’t even crush her spinal cord.

Nicky had pulled a groggy Gregor out of the way, and she cradled his head in her lap as she watched me try to kill this woman. “Oh God,” she moaned over and over again. Felipe had come back, and he pulled another chair from the billiard room to finally block off the second elevator. This time, Nicky didn’t protest or mention her dad.

Beatrice stood down the hallway, already a dim ghost. I should have realized then that she’d jump, eventually. The first of us to give up.

But not the last.

I’d grown up with the assumption that the human body is fragile. It isn’t. “Give me a pool cue,” I said, holding out my hand. Nicky traded glances with Felipe, and I could tell she was about to ask why when he shook his head slightly, stopping her.