Beneath: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Taken World Book 4) Read online

  “Good shot,” he said. “Shots.”

  She didn’t reply. He put his hand on the small of her back and guided her into the house.

  The thunder of the gunshots rippled far into the city. The smell of the monster’s death carried on the cold wind, and two streets over, a score of mutations turned the bulbous parts of their bodies that had once been heads. On these bulbous parts were a collection of eyes and nasal passages. To the uninitiated, these mutations looked like nightmare versions of a Picasso painting.

  The smell of death on the wind drew them closer to the neighborhood Tyler and May now stayed in. As did the smell of human flesh.

  Fresh human flesh.

  How long had it been since they’d smelled human? Too long. Too long. The humans were all but gone from the face of the Earth. Even the wildlife—the deer, the squirrels, the rabbits—was dwindling. Soon, the monsters would be reduced to snacking on rats, bugs, and other vermin and pests; nothing so filling and tasty as human meat.

  They moved together, almost as one single-minded organism, the smell of human sweat and fear burrowing into their nostrils.

  These monsters, these abominations, were hungry. Oh, so hungry.

  4

  Fleeing

  They were sitting on the couch. It was back up against the door. As Tyler settled into the cushions, a mildewy smell wafted out and hit his nostrils. It reminded him of his grandfather’s basement. Before Nana had come to live with them in Atlanta, she’d lived east, in Athens, on a nice plot of land in a nice farmhouse with a nice man who died much too young, a man named Charles Stapleton. Tyler’s grandfather, Charles—Charlie to his friends—raised chickens, goats, and a few cows. They had a well, and the water was so clear and cold that it practically cut your mouth when you drank it.

  Tyler remembered visiting his grandparents when he was a little boy, a time that seemed so simple. He and his mother would make the drive out to Athens on special occasions, so Tyler would count the days until his birthday or Christmas or Thanksgiving, and sometimes even the Fourth of July, when Charles would have a big cookout and there would be basketball games and fresh fruit punch and Grandpa would get a little drunk and swear. It was the funniest thing hearing him swear. ‘A God-fearing man never swears’ was what he always said…unless he’d ‘had a few beers in him.’ Of course, God would understand. Though Nana didn’t, and that somehow made it funnier.

  Before his grandfather got cancer, the scariest thing in Tyler’s young life was his grandparents’ basement. It was a cold, stony place. The walls were cracked, and the furnace made a noise like a monster lived inside of it. Sometimes Nana would send him down there to bring up the laundry. He wouldn’t want to go, but he didn’t want to disappoint Nana, either. There was only one bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, which you turned on by pulling a string. The string was high above Tyler’s head; he could barely reach it. In that split second when he was focusing on gripping the cord and pulling it, he was sure things were moving in the shadows, closing in on him. Terrible things: monsters and ghouls and ghosts with red eyes and sharp, sharp teeth. But when the light clicked on, the shadows went away, driven back into their corners and cracks.

  Once, Tyler had overheard Gramps talking about something called the Underground Railroad. There was a secret room in the basement he had discovered when he bought the house in ’73. It wasn’t so secret anymore. But in that room, slaves would hide until it was safe to move on, steadily heading north. This, of course, confused Tyler. He saw no train tracks, no conductors with their nifty hats, nothing that signified there was an Underground Railroad there at all.

  Gramps had also said—when he was drunk, of course—that he could sometimes hear his ancestors down there, could hear their ghosts and their spirits talking. Tyler was nearly reduced to tears, and probably would’ve given into them had Antoine, another boy in the neighborhood, not invited him to shoot hoops in the driveway. Still, that night, Tyler had the worst nightmare he had ever had—until the night before the voids broke open, that was.

  In the nightmare, he heard something in the basement of his grandparents’ house. A voice asking for help. Tyler looked around and called out for Gramps and Nana and his mom, but no one answered. The basement door opened, the hinges creaking loudly. Down there, deep within the bowels of the house, a greenish light spilled forth. In this light was a gravity that pulled him forward. He was useless to resist. His feet were moving on their own, that green light pulling and pulling.

  His bare feet touched the stone floor. It was cold, so cold.

  Help me, please. Get me out of here. Please.

  He turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs, and what he saw froze a scream in his throat. A young black man, naked except for a shabby cloth around his waist, nailed to the walls by large spikes driven through his palms and his ankles. Blood rolled from the wounds. A red pool had spread across the basement floor, stretching to the washer in the corner.

  Please help me. I just want to go home.

  Tyler moved forward, again without choice. His feet submerged in the red pool. The blood was warm and sticky. His body crawled with revulsion. He felt nauseous, and that was new. He had never felt that in a dream before.

  I’ll help you, he said, and he leaned forward. His fingers closed over the man’s hands, scrabbling in the leaking blood. He gripped the nail and pulled. No luck.

  Help me help me help meeeee!

  Tyler began crying.

  Then, suddenly, the man’s eyes turned the same shade of red as the ghosts’ and monsters’ of the basement. Teeth grew from his gums, as big as blades. The man—if you could still call him that—leaned his head forward, and his mouth peeled open. Teeth came down on Tyler’s hand. The sharpness sank through his flesh and even pierced his bones. He reeled backward as the man nailed to the wall laughed, Tyler’s blood coursing from the corners of the man’s mouth, his eyes burning brighter and brighter.

  That was when Tyler woke up, his hand throbbing. He rolled out of bed and clattered onto the roadmap rug in the middle of his broom closet of a room. He screamed for his mother, but she wasn’t there. She was working late, pulling a double shift. His hand throbbed with pain. As young as he was, he knew there was just no way that he could get bitten in a dream and feel it when he woke up. Life wasn’t like A Nightmare on Elm Street; it wasn’t a movie.

  But when he looked down, there were teeth marks embedded into his skin, standing out stark white in the darkness of his flesh. And they were different than his own.

  Sitting on the couch next to May, he thought about that dream, and about his grandfather. His grandfather who would get cancer only a few years later, who would battle it for many hard months, whose sickness would drain their bank account and force Nana to sell the farmhouse to pay off the medical bills, whose sickness left her widowed and living with Tyler and his mother in a small, ratty apartment in one of the worst parts of Atlanta. He thought of it now because the bite marks he’d woken with, he had reasoned were made by him, that he had bitten himself in the throes of that nightmare. But he thought maybe he didn’t. Outside, impaled on the gate, was a monster from a place no human mind could completely comprehend. He had seen the creature with his own two eyes, though he had also seen worse. The impossible had become possible. Anything could happen. So perhaps it hadn’t been a dream at all. Perhaps it was a repressed memory.

  He looked at May. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” she answered at once. “I’m not all right. I’m never going to be all right again.”

  “Me either.”

  “But I’m still alive, and as long as I’m still alive, I’m going to keep fighting. It’s simple.” She yawned and leaned her head on Tyler’s shoulder.

  A few minutes later, her breathing was steady and deep. She was asleep.

  5

  Run

  Tyler dozed off, too. It wasn’t a good idea, nor was it planned, but he was tired. He was constantly tired. Something about the evenne
ss of May’s breathing acted almost like white noise, and pretty soon, he was snoring softly right there with her on the couch that was barricaded against the front door of some stranger’s house.

  Who knew how many hours later, a noise outside jolted him awake.

  Instantly, he grabbed for his weapon. This was such a common thing these days that he paid no mind to it, but had he gone back in time and told himself he would one day be waking up with his fingers on a pistol instead of the snooze button, he would’ve told his future self he was crazy.

  From outside came the straining groan of the gate.

  Tyler’s eyes opened wider. He nudged May. “Get up,” he said. “Grab your gun.”

  She did, and she was more alert than he had been upon first waking. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I think we’ve got company.”

  “Human or monster?”

  “My guess,” Tyler said, “is more monsters.”

  He stood up slowly. The monsters, if it was monsters, sometimes possessed heightened senses. There were kinds that could hear for miles, kinds that could smell flesh in a thunderstorm, kinds that could see through walls…or so it seemed.

  He parted the curtain on the front door and looked outside. There were monsters all right. Straight up abominations. One that looked like a moving pile of vomit with hands and eyes studied the dead dog monster on the fence post. More were behind it, inching closer. There were mutations, and there were aliens. Tyler felt the fear, yes, but he wasn’t completely afraid—not like he’d been upon first coming out of that tank, forty-eight hours after the Ravaging began. No, he was at least somewhat used to this now.

  “How many?” May asked, as she was used to it, too.

  “About a dozen.”

  “Shit.”

  Tyler had a tight grip on his gun. Still peering out of the window, the monsters, the abominations, seemed to focus in on him. His skin prickled.

  “Back door. C’mon, let’s move,” he urged.

  May stood up. Her knees crackled. Tyler was glad to see she had used her bad arm for support. That meant it was getting stronger, healing. It would never be the same, that was true—Grace had told them that back at Ironlock—but it was better than not having an arm at all.

  He guided her through the hall, past the kitchen and a spare bedroom, the covers still rumpled from whomever had slept there last, months ago probably.

  There was a back door with green and yellow plaid curtains over the windows. Tyler turned the knob slowly and pulled, trying to gauge the door’s level of creaking. It hardly made a noise. The previous owners must’ve kept the hinges well oiled, and thank God for that. They slipped out into the backyard.

  The low fence at the edge of the property was just short enough for Tyler to climb over without much noise. May, however, struggled. Halfway through her descent on the opposite side, her good arm slipped. Tyler struck out for her, but he was too slow. May tumbled onto her backside, taking Tyler with her. Her leg kicked out, and the sound of her sole hitting the fence jingled and rang throughout the quiet of the neighborhood.

  Tyler and May sat in the cold, wet grass for a moment, not breathing, waiting for the inevitable.

  The inevitable came with a monster’s roar. It was much like a lion’s, but still, beneath the unmistakably alien tone, Tyler thought he could hear a human’s scream. A pained one.

  Quickly, faster than Tyler and May could get up, the monsters came around the back. Mutant things. The Devil’s Vomit. They were things that resembled bugs, large as man; things that resembled nothing at all.

  The monster in the lead looked like a grayish-green slug. It plowed through the low fence, teeth bared in the part of its anatomy that would’ve been its face. Four hands opened and closed, opened and closed. It let out a scream—not a roar, but a human scream, like a woman who was in the process of getting murdered.

  May tensed against Tyler.

  He put his body between her and the monsters, more of which filed in behind the slug creature. He didn’t bother aiming his gun. He knew what he and May had to do; it was not something he was proud of, not something he would choose to do if he didn’t have to.

  “Run!” he yelled, and grabbed May’s hand, pulling her in the opposite direction of the fence they’d just climbed over.

  His breath hitched. Fear filled him, and he thought to himself that this might be the end, that they had come all the way to D.C. just to die.

  He thought this. Outwardly, he portrayed confidence—or at least, he hoped he did. May needed him. He couldn’t just fold over and accept his fate. Maybe had she not been with him, he would. But she was with him, so he would do no such thing.

  They crossed the yard opposite, weaving in and out of clothing lines with shirts and jeans hanging from them.

  Behind them, Tyler heard the monsters advancing. There was a terrible clatter, and he figured one must’ve plowed through the fence, ripped the metal from the ground and dragged it along. May let out a soft scream.

  Tyler said, “It’s okay. We’re okay. We’ll be okay.”

  They came out on the opposite street. Not far ahead, maybe a quarter mile, stood the Amsterdam Mall. Lights burned within the windows like beacons of hope. Tyler pointed to it. It was their carrot on a stick, and they would chase it until they were safe.

  Another terrible roar came from behind them, so loud, so near, that Tyler felt his insides unravel. He picked up his pace, dragging May along. She grunted in pain. He wasn’t sure if he had her bad arm or her good arm… Right then, it didn’t really matter. A hurt arm was much better than what would happen if one of the monsters caught up with them.

  They were running in the middle of the road, passing cars that hadn’t started in nearly half a year. Tyler remembered this street; Home Avenue. Just up ahead, on the corner of 33rd, was a bagel place called Carmen’s that he would swing by before he drove into the heart of D.C. for work. They had the best blueberry bagels he’d ever had.

  They passed Carmen’s now. The front window had shattered a long time ago, and darkness spilled out. The bagels on display were covered with flies and maggots, rotted to mostly nothing.

  May breathed heavily. Somewhere behind them, a car flipped over. Tyler looked back and cursed himself for doing so as soon as he did. ‘Never look back’ was a saying of Nana’s. The woman hadn’t even graduated from high school, but she knew a lot more about life than most people, that was for sure.

  Behind them, the slug had been dethroned, and something else was now in the lead. Where its head should’ve been was just a large, red gash dripping with gore. Teeth rippled up its midsection, sharp as ever. Tyler guessed that was where it fed.

  Yeah, cut out the middleman, forget about the throat and the digestive tract…just shove it right into your belly! he thought madly.

  May stumbled, taking Tyler down with her. He scraped his knees on the asphalt.

  In that split second of time, the creature with four hands closed in on them, so close that Tyler could smell it—the foul scent of death and alien dust.

  He got up and yanked May to her feet. They faced the abomination together. The thing moved with the fluidity of a fish in water, almost like it was gliding across the asphalt. Tyler was still holding his gun in the hand not holding May’s hand, and he brought it to bear. But even as he did this, his blood pressure spiking, and his heart ready to stop beating once and for all, he knew it was a futile gesture. The bullets would only bounce off the creature’s hide. They would not even make a scratch. The monster would feel like it was being tickled…if a creature such as that had the ability to be tickled.

  It was closing in now, so close that the creature’s girth blotted out the dark sky. Tyler would’ve screamed, had he not been sucking in as much air as he could as he scrambled to get out of there, to bring May with him.

  The monster was coming. It was moving fast, opening and closing its four hands…four hands that he saw possessed so many fingers, and at the end of
its countless fingers were claws, long and sharp.

  6

  Saved

  The scream that had frozen in Tyler’s throat burst forth now. He felt warm fingers scrabbling at his flesh. Something grabbed him around the neck from behind and pulled. The hands were strong, much too strong to be human, but he was still facing forward, and in front of him was the monster that possessed the four human-like hands. It just didn’t make—

  “Come on, dude,” a voice was saying behind him—the same voice, he realized, that the hands belonged to. “I’m trying to save your life, here.”

  Tyler quit fighting. He stood up with the help of the stranger and a nearby Buick, and found his footing again. Once on his feet, he dragged May up.

  By this time, two men in full riot gear stepped in front of them and started shooting the monsters with guns that made no sound. All that came was the flash from the rifles’ muzzles, and then the bullets hit home in the creature’s bulk.

  The shots didn’t stop the monsters, but they slowed them down.

  “Through here,” the man said.

  He still had a hold on Tyler’s jacket and was pulling roughly. Tyler had May’s hand, though the sweat coating his palms was not making it an easy task. He thought he was going to lose his grip, thought he was going to leave May for dead, but—

  They were inside now. In a matter of seconds, they had crossed yards and yards of road and now tumbled into a loading dock below the Amsterdam Mall. The man who had saved their lives pulled the garage door down with a clang. The shutter vibrated, and the noise echoed far in the muted darkness of the place.

  Tyler was breathing hard. He thought he heard May crying.

  From outside came the sounds of gunshots and wounded shrieks from the monsters.