Damn thing’s going to fall right on our heads.
You could always tell when someone was living in a place, and Will didn’t see any of those signs now. It took him a moment to realize that the refuse scattered around them wasn’t where the smell was coming from.
What the hell is that smell?
There was a lone window at the end of the hallway, but a dirty blanket, held in place by what looked like rusted nails, covered it up. Slivers of sunlight still managed to peek through, providing enough natural light for them to make out the hallway’s layout and avoid the more unsavory objects sticking out from the brown and stained carpeting, which itself looked miserably unhinged, as if someone had tried to rip it out but gave up halfway into the job.
Will remembered seeing covered windows all along the apartment building’s twenty floors as they rolled up on the Wilshire. Someone had gone to a lot of work to cover up a building that was supposed to have been empty since 2004.
Marker was setting the pace up front, his pump-action shotgun in front of him. They were approaching one of the very last apartments in the hallway, though one rotted door looked the same as the other. Intel had undesirables taking over the Wilshire, with the last apartment down the hall serving as a possible crack den. Where you found junkies, you found drug dealers. Junkies were customers, and customers paid. The problem with drug dealers was that they were territorial. Plus, they were usually armed. That was a bad combination.
They quickly stacked up next to Apartment 2025, the last one in the hallway. Marker let his shotgun hang in front of him from a sling and pulled out a flash bang canister from one of his pouches. He nodded to Peeks, who slipped out of line and faced the door. Peeks spent a second settling his stance, then changed up his grip on the sledgehammer. He took a deep breath, threw Marker a nod, then shattered the doorknob of Apartment 2025 with one arching, massive overhead swing. The door seemed to crush in on itself, a combination of force from Peeks and the door’s rotting wood finally, mercifully, giving way after all these years.
Peeks spun out of the way until his back was to the door. Marker tossed the flash bang into the apartment. They heard the loud, familiar pop!, saw a brief white flash flood out of the opened door, momentarily lighting up the semi-dark hallway.
Then Marker was inside, shouting, “Police! Get down!”
Ross and Jenkins disappeared through the door behind Marker. Peeks, the shotgun back in his hands and the sledgehammer back in its holster, was right behind them. Will and Danny started to follow Peeks inside when they heard a man scream.
Will entered with the M4A1 swinging up to chest level, his right eye scanning for targets behind the sight mounted on top of the rifle. The brief period it usually took him to get used to seeing the world behind the myopic clear lens — with a bright red dot in the center — flashed by in one-tenth of a heartbeat.
Will was almost a meter into the apartment, a half second through the doorway — scanning from left to right, controlling his breathing — when he heard the scream again. This time he had images to go with the sound.
Marker was down, and something crouched over him. No, not over him, on top of him. A man. Maybe. A woman, possibly. Naked. Sinewy muscle moved in the darkness, more silhouetted shadow than actual shapes and forms.
The room was dark. All the windows were covered like in the hallway, except there were no chances of sunlight in here.
The thing had its mouth clamped over Marker’s throat, and it was tearing at the soft and vulnerable flesh. Will saw, almost in slow motion, blood squirting out of Marker in arching spurts, bright red against the suffocating darkness of the room. He swore he could smell Marker’s blood as it splashed against the filthy carpet, the scent horrid and fascinating even against the powerful stench that permeated every single inch of the building.
The floor was thick with a liquid substance that stuck to Will’s boots when he moved, the plop-plop sound sending a disturbing image through his mind that forced him to waste another precious second to push aside.
Ross and Jenkins began firing on the thing clawing at Marker’s face. They had their M4 assault rifles on semi-automatic, and while Ross put a bullet in the figure’s forehead, Jenkins fired into its chest. It seemed taken aback by the gunfire, but it didn’t go down.
That’s impossible.
He had killed men before. He knew what was supposed to happen when you shot someone in the head. They went down. It didn’t matter how big or small, male or female. They all went down. It was instantaneous. What you don’t do is shake off a bullet to the head from a distance of two meters. You don’t stumble and growl back at the person who just shot you.
That doesn’t happen in real life.
Behind him, Danny whispered, breathless, “Fuck me.”
Will heard them before he actually saw them. Thin, hunched-over figures padding forward in the darkness on bare feet. Maybe they had always been there. He couldn’t be sure. Maybe they were coming out of the walls but, of course, that was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
They emerged out of the blackness around them. A wall of nude figures. Men and women. Maybe. They had no visible sex organs. He couldn’t tell their ages, because they didn’t seem to possess any of the things people use to tell each other apart, to stand out as unique individuals. They stood about the same height, dark and black pruned skin that was almost entirely hairless, yellow teeth stained black and brown, grotesque and jagged (Meth teeth), and their eyes…
The eyes gave them away. Even in the darkness, he could see they had dark, solid black eyes. Like tar, the thick, gooey, smelly substance that his father used to work with when he fixed roofs for people who could afford to hire out basic jobs they’d rather not do themselves.
These creatures had those — small oceans of black tar where eyes used to be.
They were so thin he could see bone protruding out of skin. No, not skin, really. Like cheap Halloween costumes draped over bony shoulders and meatless bones. Their faces were freakishly gaunt, and cheekbones stuck out like carved pumpkins. He instantly flashed on late-night commercials of Third World children suffering from malnutrition and obese men with white beards begging for monthly donations.
Then something fell on top of Ross and drove him to the floor. Another one. Naked, smaller than the rest, maybe a child. It was hard to tell. They all looked small and frail and dangerously on the verge of collapsing underneath their own sickness. But this one had enough strength to tear out Ross’s throat in front of Will.
“Back, back!” he screamed.
Jenkins turned and made a run for the door when another one — a girl maybe — darted out of a dark corner and leaped on his back. Jenkins stumbled to the floor and quickly tried to get back up. The girl climbed up Jenkins’s back as if he were some kind of mountain to be conquered and bit into his shoulder blade between the straps of his tactical vest.
Will saw blood spraying, and then Jenkins was screaming, too.
To Will’s right, Peeks let out a wild, incoherent scream and began firing with his shotgun. The noise of each blast in the closed confines of the apartment was earsplitting, even with the ballistic helmet partially pulled over Will’s ears.