Timing the blows, Dana darted to the bed and dragged it up against the dresser, trying to wedge its feet against differing levels in the floorboards in the vain hope that it would jam the dresser in place.
But it was like putting sticking plaster over a compound fracture. It was only a matter of time until the bitch found her way in, and Dana already knew that the room offered nothing that she could use as a weapon.
At least I’m still working, she thought with unnatural calm. She was amazed that her heart hadn’t exploded with the terror and her limbs hadn’t simply ceased to function.
The dresser rocked and the bed’s legs screeched as they were driven against the floor. Dana went to the door and tried it again. She’d heard the heavy bolts thumping in as soon as the door had slammed behind her, but before she’d been able to investigate the ghostly shape of Mother appeared at the window and started hammering. So who the hell locked me in? she wondered, working at the handle. It turned, but the door was stuck fast in its frame, with not even an inch of give. Solid, like a wall.
Now Dana started kicking at the door’s wooden panels, aiming the heels of her trainers at the corners. The feel and sound of each kick was all wrong, as if the wood was simply a veneer, and beneath lay something solid, like metal. She felt panic starting to well up— Keep calm, calm, I’ve come this far—
—and then the dresser tilted against the bed, scraping it across the floor with its leaning weight, and around the side of the dresser she saw Mother’s gray weathered hand clasping at the room’s air.
Dana had to make a quick choice: stay and fight with the door, hoping she could get out before Mother got in; or try to kill the zombie before it killed her. How the fuck do you kill a zombie? she wondered, and a hundred images from a hundred horror movies flashed across her mind. Destroy their heads, destroy their brains, burn them, decapitate them, take off their arms and legs and they’ll still come at you, jawing themselves along the ground in their search for your flesh, your heart, your braaaainnnns.
She plucked up a bedside lamp and, as Mother peered from behind the leaning dresser, smashed it across her face. The zombie barely seemed to notice. She looked at Dana and continued working her way from behind the tilted furniture, two hands free now, torso, and one leg lifted clear and planted against the bed, ready to kick up and launch herself through the air.
Dana backed against the wall, because she was out of options. She closed her eyes briefly and thought of Jules, and wondered how much it would hurt.
Something thumped with a loud impact, and a shower of glass scraped across her shoulder and past her face. She gasped and jumped, looked down, and saw the bizarre hunting picture, face up on the floor. Then she heard Holden’s gasps and grunts.
She pulled back a little and he knocked out the rest of the glass from the one-way mirror, using a lamp base as an impromptu club. He didn’t smile when he saw her, only looked past her at Mother. From his room Dana could hear thumping, as well, but there were no zombies in there.
Not yet.
She let out an explosive sob and Holden looked at her at last, offering a brief smile. “My door’s stuck,” he said.
“Mine too!”
“Come on.” He held out his hand and Dana took it, and as she climbed through into his room she expected to feel Mother’s hand clasping her ankle at any moment, the skin cold and rough, the strength impossible. But she fell through onto Holden’s floor, wincing as errant glass shards sliced her scalp and scratched across the bridge of her nose. Holden slipped on something and went down with her, and for a moment they were close and she could taste the panic on his breath.
She checked out his room and saw the pile of furniture stacked against his own window.
“That didn’t do much good for—” she began, and his wardrobe tilted inward and crashed to the floor. It threw up clouds of dust and shook the floorboards, and as she and Holden helped each other up she saw big-zombie standing in the shattered window frame.
“That’ll be Matthew,” she said, and giving the thing a name seemed almost stupid enough to laugh. Almost.
“Well he’s big enough to—”
“The bed!” Dana said. And as Holden tipped it on its end and she helped him shove it against the window, she knew that it was futile. Matthew thumped at the mattress as they pushed it close, and she thought he was perhaps being playful, like a cat knocking a mouse around with only a shred of its full strength before killing it.
They leaned against the upended bed, looking at each other, and the sense of hopelessness was shattering. I haven’t even had a chance to take a breath, she thought, and for a moment she almost kissed him. But that, too, would have felt so stupid, and so final.
So instead she looked around for something else they could use—as a weapon, or to help secure the bed against the wall—and that was when she saw the trapdoor.
“Er… Holden,” she said, nodding to the side. It had been hidden beneath the bed up to now, and already she was thinking of all the stuff down there in the basement that they could use as weapons. Those tools, the chains, maybe even something from Roberto the Limbless Man’s circus. And all the other stuff, the weird stuff.
That picture of Patience staring with dead eyes…
Mother appeared at the shattered mirror. She stood there for a moment, hands clasping at the jagged glass still stuck in the frame’s sill, staring in at them. Don’t let her smile, Dana thought. I don’t think I could handle a smile.
But Mother did not smile. She started to climb instead, clumsily trying to shove one leg and her head through the small gap at the same time. It wouldn’t take her long to figure it out.
“Go,” Holden whispered, and Dana went to the trapdoor. She grabbed the small rusted handle set in one edge and pulled, fearing it would be jammed tight, and falling back in surprise as it swung up and open without even a squeak from the hinges.
Oiled recently, she thought. There was nothing but blackness below, and the smell of age. She looked up at Holden.
“Better or worse, you think?” she asked.
“Lamp,” he said, nodding at the small table beside where his bed used to be. It was still plugged in, so Dana leaned out and grabbed its shade, glancing back over her shoulder as she did so. Mother now had both legs over the mirror’s sill and was trying to press her head through, as well, straggly hair caught on glass shards above. She was growling and keening.
Dana lowered the lamp, holding the cord and letting it dangle when it reached its extreme. She leaned down and looked into the basement. It was empty, just a dirt-floored space below the room. Maybe it connected to the main area they’d been in, somehow, or maybe not, but right then it seemed not to matter. She didn’t think they had any choice.
“It’s empty,” she announced.
Holden shoved the bed into place one last time, glanced across at Mother still struggling at the smashed hole in the wall, then moved to his door.
“Curt!” he shouted. “Curt!”
Moments later the door knob twisted left and right, the door not moving at all. “Unlock your door!” Curt called, and Dana never thought she’d be so glad to hear his voice.
“I can’t, it’s locked!” Holden shouted. “Got Dana in with me. Get down to the basement, we’ve got a way down from here!”