“Let me help you with that.”
Flynn eased the plate from my grip and took the other one off the counter. He laid them on the kitchen island before guiding me to the barstool with a hand on my lower back.
“Are you sure that you don’t want to eat at the table?” he asked, eyeing the barstool.
“I’m sure,” I said. “I haven’t felt dizzy all afternoon.”
He helped me onto the seat and watched me from the corner of his eye as I blew steam from the rice.
Then a bomb exploded.
The cabin shuddered, and I toppled from the barstool and only managed not to slam into the ground because Flynn caught me by the upper arm. He hauled me to my feet, keeping me upright against the counter even though his attention had travelled outside.
“Get upstairs,” he said.
I watched him collect his respirator and a Browning rifle from the hall tree before bolting through the front door. The door swung back into a closed position, but the latch didn’t quite click into place.
I wobbled when I stepped away from the counter, grabbing hold of the nearest barstool to keep my balance. It was slow work moving from the kitchen to the laundry room. The dizziness slowed my pace for sure, but so did the explosions that rippled through the floor.
Flynn kept his guns on display. A Browning semi-automatic rifle and a Winchester rifle leaned against the hall tree while a matching set of Ruger semi-automatic pistols rested on stands atop the fireplace mantle. He even had a sawed-off Winchester shotgun that lived on his nightstand. There wasn’t an open corner of this cabin that a piece of heavy artillery didn’t call home.
But they were big guns with a recoil that nearly knocked me over whenever Flynn coaxed me onto his makeshift firing range in the woods. I couldn’t hope to fire one of them one-handed since using both hands was out of the question. So I had to get ahold of my gun.
My Glock G22 semi-auto pistol belonged to a Suffolk County Sheriff before I pried it from her corpse. It served me well enough: accuracy at a distance and plenty of power to stop a running Howler or human.
I gripped the doorframe until the aftershocks of the explosion stopped vibrating through the floor and then went directly for the cabinet in the far corner. There was a false shelf on the bottom of the left-hand side which hid a sixteen-inch by sixteen-inch cubby that I’d discovered a day after Flynn and I moved into the cabin. He didn’t know about it, and he didn’t know about my Glock, the holster, or the ammunition that I’d found when he still allowed me on supply runs.
I checked the chamber for a bullet before sliding a new magazine inside. When I started back for the doorway, the front door banged open. The bang was quickly drowned out by shrieks. Each hit an octave that threatened to burst my eardrums, the sound travelling through my skin and leaving bits of shrapnel behind until it lodged firmly in my chest. It was pain embodied, and it was nothing like the pain humming below the surface in my arm. This pain was one of living flesh being devoured one molecule at a time.
Howlers stampeded through the living room, and their footsteps branched off in different directions. Some faded while others stomped toward the doorway of the laundry room.
The front of the cabinet pressed against my shoulder blades until I realized that I’d backed myself into the corner. I trained the Glock on the open doorway and rested my finger on the trigger guard. A drop of sweat trickled down from behind the hair at my temple. The rest of my body was still, and even my heartrate had slowed to a crawl.
I breathed in. I breathed out.
The Howler stumbled into the doorway.
Howlers used to be human and were still considered human by Howlers-Rights groups before the second asteroid hit Greenland. The scientists that survived the first strike in Australia theorized that a microscopic organism carried by the asteroid caused excruciating pain when introduced to the human body. It did other things, too: multiplying and devouring every healthy cell it could find; causing the skin and underlying fat and muscle tissue to seemingly melt off the body; and instilling an insatiable, cannibalistic hunger.
I knew more about the Howler in the doorway than any of the scientists before or after the second asteroid. Mostly because there wasn’t enough time between the two strikes for anything but panic to spread, and because those still alive after the second were more concerned with survival than pursuit of scientific inquiry.
The Howler in front of me curled back what remained of its lips in a snarl, displaying its worn, graying teeth. Its sunken eyes peered out from a face that seemed ready to sluff off at the slightest breeze. There was no skin left and only a few muscles curling over the white of its skull.
The Howler let out an ear-piercing shriek, and then it charged.
I deliberately moved my index finger from the trigger guard to the trigger, sighted-in on the barreling figure’s forehead, and delicately squeezed the trigger. The bang that followed made my ears ring even more so than the shriek.
The Howler slammed to a stop like it had run head-first into a glass wall before crumpling to the floor. I felt rather than heard the pounding feet of the other Howlers racing toward the gunshot. The narrow doorway forced them into a nearly single-file line, and those behind bunched up in the hallway, creating a logjam.
I picked them off one by one with a bullet to the forehead. My head pounded from all the gunshots, and the smell of burning gunpowder briefly overpowered the smell of necrotic flesh.
It jarred me out of my rhythm when they stopped clambering overtop of their counterparts. I forced my index finger back to the trigger guard and pressed through the emptiness in my ears to listen for the shrieks. There were none.
I turned back to the cabinet to reload my gun before inching my way toward the accumulation of bodies on my laundry room floor. I gave them as wide of a berth as possible in such a narrow space and used my gun hand to balance against the doorframe when I had to step atop them to get through the doorway.
Any other Howlers that’d entered the house would’ve come running to the sound of the firefight, but I still cleared every room on the first floor after knocking the front door shut with my foot. Their bloody tracks only made it halfway up the stairs, so I didn’t bother mounting them to check for a hidden Howler in the master bedroom or bathroom.
For the first time in a long time, the cabin felt secure. The Glock waited for me on the counter next to the plates of now-cold rice while I retrieved one of the last water bottles in the refrigerator. I sat down and finished my rice.
Flynn shuffled through the front door nearly two hours later. His respirator hung around his neck, the plastic face-shield crackled like a car windshield after being struck by a rock. His shotgun was nowhere in sight. There wasn’t a piece of clothing on him that hadn’t been shredded, and the skin showing through the gaps in fabric was raw.
“Isabel.” My name was hoarse in his throat.
I shot to my feet and then grabbed onto the counter to keep the sudden dizziness from knocking me to the floor. In doing so, I bumped my arm ever so slightly, and the broken bones screamed.
“Easy, hon.”
His hands were on my upper arms, guiding me back to the barstool so that I could lean back against the counter’s edge. He kept his hands in place while I breathed through the pain. Inhaled through my nose. Exhaled between my teeth.
The blinding pain eased little by little until it hit a bearable level. It was then that I got a good look at Flynn, and what I saw made my heart drop.
“Flynn,” I said quietly. “Did you get scratched?”
Flynn stepped back until he was an arm’s length away. When he looked me in the eye, I knew the answer.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”