“My favorite part of every day!” she said, her voice purposefully loud, as if she had been holding the volume back all night — which, he guessed, was true.
He got up and moved around to get the blood flowing to all of his extremities again. The attic was big enough that he could stretch to his full six-one height with plenty of space to spare. Hannah, all five-three of her, never had to worry about cramming into a small corner. He always did his best to find them a hiding place with enough room for both of them to be comfortable, but that wasn’t always possible. This attic had been a godsend — not to mention all the supplies packed into the house’s pantries underneath it. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling it was a mistake to have stayed here for three straight nights. That was usually one night longer than he was comfortable with.
Stop it. You’re alive. Hannah’s alive. That’s all that matters…
Riley slung his shotgun and walked to the trapdoor. He crouched and eased it open before sticking his head forward and breathing in the fresh air.
“Smell good?” Hannah asked behind him.
“Like a nice Big Breakfast platter at Mickey D’s.”
“Taco Bell all the way, baby.”
“Pfft,” he said, exaggerating the smirk before pulling back the collapsible ladder and extending it below. “Ladies first.”
“Since when am I a lady?”
“Close enough. Now come on, down you go.”
She leaned over the opening and took a long look at the second floor hallway below, just the way they had practiced. The room was lit up by a pool of light that reflected off her slightly grimy face, and Riley wondered what he looked like at the moment. He hadn’t showered in…God, he couldn’t remember. It didn’t help that he had been wearing the same clothes for just as long. The only saving grace was that both he and Hannah had gone smell blind a long time ago.
“Clear?” he asked.
“Looks clear,” she said.
“Be certain.”
“I’m certain. Pretty certain.”
“Pretty certain or just certain?”
She snorted. “Pretty certain, certain.”
“Good enough.”
He watched the girl climb down, then heard the thump as she jumped the last few steps to the hallway below.
“Hey,” he called after her.
“What?” she said from below.
“Don’t wander off.”
“I’m just standing here waiting for you, dude. Can you please hurry it up already?”
He smiled. Hannah had called him dude for three weeks after they first met, before one day she started using Riley. Now it was back and forth between the two, depending on how annoyed she was with him, like she was now.
He had turned around to position himself on the stairs to follow her down when he heard footsteps below him. “Hannah,” he said, slightly alarmed.
“What?” she called back from below.
“Strength in numbers, remember?”
“I’m just going to get my stuff in the bedroom.”
“Hannah, wait for me.”
She didn’t answer, which prompted him to hop the last six feet down the ladder and land in a crouch. Riley had never been particularly athletic, but he’d since discovered some modicum of athleticism he didn’t know existed. He wasn’t going to take on Michael Jordan at the Y anytime soon, but he was doing things now he never thought he would — or could — do before the world decided to stop making sense.
He was straightening up, hands groping for the shotgun slung over his back, when he looked up the hallway and saw Hannah with one hand on the doorknob of the master bedroom. She had already pushed it open, and he glimpsed pitch darkness on the other side that immediately set alarms off inside his head because it shouldn’t have been that dark in there.
“Hannah!” he shouted.
She stopped and looked back, and a smile flashed across her face. Even with all that dirt, he thought she looked cherubic — sweet and innocent. Hannah was someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, and though Riley never had any siblings—
“Hannah—” he said again when he saw the shadows in the master bedroom, barely visible through the small slit in the ajar door, move.
She must have either heard or smelled them, because she turned around at almost the exact same moment it reached out—a deformed hand, bony fingers uncurling—and grabbed her around the ankle. The acidic stench of searing flesh filled the hallway almost immediately as the exposed part of the creature’s skin turned to white ash against the sunlight, and Riley thought he might have heard something that sounded like a squeal of pain from inside the room, but all of that was lost against Hannah’s screaming. She might have started out trying to yell his name, but it quickly became lost in a long cry that filled the entire house.
Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus blurred across his mind as a second hand reached out and long, bony fingers wrapped around Hannah’s other ankle. The flesh on the second hand burned off as it made contact with the sunlight, but even as clouds of white-gray ash filled the hallway, both hands tightened their grip around Hannah’s legs and the creatures pulled her in—
“Hannah!”
It took him less than a couple of seconds to cross the second floor, but even as he launched himself into a run he knew — deep down, he just knew — that it was too late. She was already down, and they were pulling her along the wooden floor. The last he saw of her was Hannah, on her stomach, staring back at him with impossibly wide eyes as she tried in vain to grab the sides of the bedroom door. There was a look on her face, an expression he had first seen during that night when they found each other for the first time as the world died around them.
It had taken him weeks to figure out the story behind it because he didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to intrude on her innermost thoughts. Finally, one night, he saw it again — just a quick there-and-gone glimpse — but it was long enough for him to understand.
It was sadness.
Hannah was sad. For her loss. For his. For the world’s.
She had that same look on her face now as she lost her hold on the doorframe and—
She was gone.
He slid to a stop in front of the open door, sneakers squeaking loudly, but not enough to drown out the pounding in his chest or the constant refrain of Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus running through his head.
They were inside the master bedroom, so many that he couldn’t tell where they began and the walls and floor ended. They had covered the windows with bedsheets and blankets, and the small horde of creatures were focused in the very middle, far from the small streaks of sunlight that had managed to badger their way into the room anyway. Their backs were exposed to him, deformed spines prickling against films of flesh that barely resembled skin. The overwhelming stench, like vomit left to roast in the sun, made him gag and take a step back.
But he didn’t retreat far enough to avoid seeing one of her legs sticking out of the pile of feeding monsters. She had stopped moving, and the only sound aside from the crash of his runaway heartbeat was the unforgiving slurp-slurp-slurp.
He fired the shotgun, racked it, and fired again.
One of them glanced back at him, its hollowed obsidian eyes surrounded by pruned flesh. It looked almost annoyed, the clump-clump of coagulated blood dripping out of the hole he had made in its right shoulder.
Then it turned back around and bent its head and resumed feeding.
He racked the shotgun and fired again, this time aiming for the head of the closest one. It flopped forward but picked itself up, moving unsteadily with the top of its head mostly gone. Unlike the previous one, this creature didn’t bother to cast him an annoying glance.