Cold air blew into my face as I opened it, and my breath made ghosts in the fog. Something inside smelled funny, but I chalked it up to rotting food. I reached inside for a light switch, and a weak fluorescent light flickered on overhead. It illuminated metal racks on wheels full of beer, a couple of kegs on the floor . . .
. . . and a familiar stack of red and white cans, tucked behind one of the movable racks. I grinned in triumph.
A spider web brushed across my face, and I rubbed it away.
I should have paid attention to that, to that sensation that made me shudder. I pawed at my face and took two quick steps inside, trying not to imagine the spider that had created the string now caught in my hair.
I reached for the cans of Coke, victorious adrenaline surging through me. But that adrenaline soured, curdled as I became aware of something sticky on the floor that was sucking at my shoes.
I stared down.
A brown stain spread across the concrete floor to a drain. At first I assumed that some of the cans had frozen, exploded. But as I pushed the rack aside, I saw that it had trickled from a body on the floor.
Not just a body. I had seen dead bodies before, at funerals. Those bodies were neatly dressed in their Plain clothes, pale and sunken, usually old. Since we didn’t embalm our dead, we buried them quickly, with little ceremony. Plain dead were peaceful, solemn.
This was . . . not peaceful. A man in a T-shirt and jeans lay on the floor. His head had been torn off, missing. I saw only white vertebrae glistening in that mass of gore that had been his neck.
I jammed my fist in my mouth. I was too terrified to scream, too shocked to do anything but utter a squeak.
And then I heard the clang of the cooler door slam shut behind me.
I scuttled back, tripped on a bucket. I fell down, backwards, on the floor, in the stain. I scrambled to my feet, whimpering in terror. I shoved at the door, but it was locked.
I sobbed, slammed my fist against it. The sound echoed just like my blow on the Coke machine and was just as ineffective. I tried to control my breathing. There had to be an emergency release, some way to get out . . . my shaking fingers worked around the seam of the door, feeling for a lever or a switch.
Something made a scraping sound above me.
Swallowing hard, I looked up.
Behind the fluorescent light, I could make out shadows. I shaded my eyes from the weak light with my hand. I was able to distinguish shapes—shapes of people. They were suspended upside down from the ceiling, curled up in balls or dangling with limbs dragging in spider webs of silk that drizzled down in the darkness, holding the forms there in an ethereal embrace.
My breath disturbed a string of silk that trailed from the shadowed ceiling. It moved as intangibly as smoke. I was reminded of when I was a young girl and had disturbed a nest of corn spiders in the barn. The creatures had crawled everywhere, in my hair, my bonnet, down the neck of my dress . . .
Something up there moved, shifted. And glowing red eyes stared at me.
I saw the figure scuttle across the ceiling in a spider-like fashion, but it was human . . .
“Oh God!” I swore, jerking on the handle to the door. I rattled it, working my hands around the door, trying to find an emergency release I knew had to be there.
The creature on the ceiling approached as silently as those barn spiders, reached toward me.
My shaking hands found a cracked plastic button to the right of the door. I pulled at it, turned it, whimpering, finally slapped it hard . . .
And the door sprang open. I lurched through the doorway, running behind the bar.
I knew that thing was behind me. I ran past the line of washing machines, turned back to see it pawing along the ceiling. I didn’t watch where I was going, stumbled over a box of laundry soap. The powdered soap spewed all over the floor, and I slammed against the wall of dryers.
The glass door of one of the dryers sprang open from the impact, and I found myself face to face with the contents of the machine. At first, I assumed that they were merely clothes, but . . . that smell . . . it was the same as in the cooler.
I could see pale, broken limbs turned in on themselves, a claw of a hand tangled in a sleeve. It was a crumpled, stinking body.
I whirled, only to find the creature from the cooler walking down the wall of dryers, hands behind knees, then dropping upright, on his feet. He was pale and filthy, and he smelled like blood. But what was most unnatural was the way his eyes glowed, like a cat’s in the darkness. Behind him, I could see other shapes gathering on the ceiling.
I didn’t bother to ask him what he wanted. I knew.
He wanted to kill me. Like he and the others had killed the man in the cooler and the man in the washing machine. It didn’t matter why. There was no reasoning. This was the visceral fear of prey in the face of the predator, bitter like bile in my throat. But I was determined to run.
Chapter Nine
I sprinted for the door, breath burning in my throat. I felt the creature snatch the tails of my apron, drag me back from the door. I shrieked and flailed, my feet skidding on the sticky floor.
I heard stitches pop and give way, the sash of my apron shredding in the predator’s grip. I lunged for the door.
I heard a snarl behind me. I knew that I had no hope, that even if I reached to door, he had me. But I was determined to try, to reach that golden threshold of sunshine before I was mauled to death, before my head was torn from my shoulders like that poor man in the cooler or my broken body was stuffed in the dryer like canned meat.
I straight-armed through the door, landed on my elbows on the pavement as I felt a hand latch around my ankle. I tasted blood in my mouth where I’d bitten my lip, twisted and turned to stare my fate in the face.
And the creature hissed. Abruptly, he released my ankle, his hand smoking in the sunshine.
I scrambled to my feet and ran toward my bike. I could see the shadows seething in the Laundromat, the glowing eyes behind the dark glass, mirroring the light of the seductive Coke machine. Somehow, they were trapped, pinned there by the daylight, I realized.
I struggled onto my bike, pumping the pedals as hard as I could down the street into the shining afternoon.
I could not stop shaking on my ride home. I quaked so hard that it was difficult to keep the bike from trembling under the uneven weight of the dog food and supplies in my basket. I pedaled so hard that it felt like my lungs were going to burst, swerving on the dark ribbon of road away from even the shadows of trees. I was afraid of what may lay in that soft darkness.
I am being punished for my sins. That was my first thought. Clearly, the gates of hell had burst open. Those creatures in the Suds ’n’ Duds were not human. They radiated evil—evil like I had never known or could even have imagined before. When there had been news of a contagion, I had doubted the reality of a medical evil. What I had seen was clearly not the work of medicine. This reeked of spiritual evil, something beyond what could be fathomed by any technology belonging to man.
I licked blood from my lower lip. I knew. I knew what had happened to Seth and Joseph. And the rider on the white horse. They had fallen prey to these monsters. Tears blurred my vision. I longed to tell Elijah, but I didn’t know that I would ever be able to form the words. There would be no kind, gentle way of telling him that his brothers had been torn limb from limb.
I wrestled with whom to tell, what to say. Any tale I could tell began and ended with sins I’d committed and the discovery of the man in the barn. Given the ruthlessness with which the Elders had chosen to leave him Outside, I knew that telling would result in certain death for him.