Halloween 2023 — Tracy Dunham

Better late than never.

Nowhere to Run

Shay hadn’t left the apartment in months. No reason to. She’d stocked up on canned goods, spent every last dime she had on prepper food guaranteed to last fifty years, and stashed gallon jugs of water in every free corner of her small abode. She could barely walk from room to room. If anyone had prepared for the end of the world, it was Shay Woods.

Other preppers had done the same, and before the Internet went down, they’d kept each other apprised of the latest grim news and any possible havens reachable before all the roads were demolished. Taking out bridges and dynamiting highways had been a noisy and effective deterrent to those who thought they could run away from the world’s self-destruction. Now, short wave radios were waning, power sources were worth all the gold in Ft. Knox, and she hadn’t heard another human voice in over thirty days. Good thing she was accustomed to her own company. Preferred it, in fact.

In college, she’d been a futurist. Without the gift of clairvoyance or even glib guesses, she’d been able to predict the horror coming down the world’s roads with alarming accuracy. She’d been labelled a freak, as one after another of her predictions became reality, but she didn’t mind, not really. She accepted her freak-dom with, if not joy, at least understanding. People were afraid of those who told the truth, especially when it was ugly and scary.

Standing at the large French doors in her living room, Shay watched as the gray sun set, sinking below the few tall buildings still standing. Most had been blown to smithereens by the bombing that started with one small faction of ecoterrorists, which then escalated into major widespread destruction when outside nations decided to intervene. Like dominos, old alliances fell and it was soon every man, every country, every continent for itself.

Shay had chosen this apartment building after studying its plans in the city’s planning office. Its construction was designed to withstand major earthquakes as well as devastating hurricanes. Even though she had to walk down twelve flights of stairs to get in and out of the place, when she still could, she never felt unsafe. When her building folded, she reasoned, so would the last of civilization. Maybe by then she would be ready to fold with it. She didn’t know what kept her going. One day, she reasoned with a calm clarity, she’d hit her personal wall.

Sighing, she poured herself a small glass of water. She was rationing everything with precision, meaning water was only for consumption. She’d grown accustomed to her body odor and wearing clothes that smelled like old gym socks. She peed in a bucket and tossed the contents over her balcony whenever it rained silver streaks of pollution and ash that had replaced the cool showers of the past. Europeans had done the same with their chamber pots throughout the dark ages and into Shakespeare’s day. Why should she be squeamish?

When the last of the anemic sun disappeared, Shay stretched out on the floor of her balcony and waited for the night to come alive. This was the moment when she counted the humans she could see with her night vision binoculars, night crawlers she called them, who crept through the shadows, hunting for food and, when desperate enough, other humans to eat. By now, their numbers were tumbling. She knew herself to be safe, for she’d designed her own security system to keep intruders out. If, by chance, a crawler did breach her building, she’d designed an escape hatch. She never went to sleep without her survival backpack at hand. Still, no one had any clue she was still in the building. Soon though, she feared she’d be alone. Even a nightcrawler was, in some odd way, a comfort. Tonight, however, crawlers were scarce. Feeling even more alone, she decided to turn in early.

Back in her interior bedroom, windowless and therefore safe, she lit one of her dwindling supply of candles and pulled out a tattered paperback. She’d never read novels until she realized many science fiction books had, to her amazement, predicted much of what was happening in the world. Finally, she’d branched out into mysteries, thrillers, even romances. Her favorites were now cozy mysteries, where small, quaint towns served as the backdrop for not-too-violent murders, and charming townsfolk bantered and gossiped their way into finding the killer. Collecting the books from abandoned book stores and libraries had stopped, however, when it became too dangerous to leave her building.

She had many favorites, but the ones containing animals who helped solve the mystery, and others with recipes in the back that the characters cooked for their fictional friends, were top of the list. Tonight, she pulled out one of her very special paperbacks, Death in Danbury Hills. The rolling mountains of Piedmont, Virginia, was the setting for a literary mystery involving a descendant of Charles Dickens and a lost love letter. Shay loved imagining she worked in the library run by the principal character, Molly, and that she shared Molly’s grandmother’s Victorian house with her.

Keeping an eye on her candle, Shay was forced to blow it out before she’d finished half the book. By now, she could recite lines of dialogue, but she still liked re-reading it and putting herself into the scenes. Imagining herself in the story, she fell asleep with the opened book lying across her chest. Dreams came easily when she slipped into sleep reading. Normally, they gave her a sense of peace her world had destroyed in reality.

Tonight, her sleep and her world were shattered in one second. Shay’s dream exploded into the present, and she was aware that her safe haven had been breached, and she was at extreme risk. Rolling off her bed, she grabbed for the shotgun she kept under it and aimed it at the bedroom door. Trying to control her breathing, she felt lightheaded and almost on the verge of fainting. She’d never fainted before, and she wasn’t about to do it now, she told herself sternly.

Sounds of rummaging came from the pantry where she’d stockpiled her most used food items, tuna, chicken, chick peas, and jam. Cries of “yes!” and “we’re in fat city now!” reached her through her locked bedroom door. If she didn’t move quickly to stop them, the nightcrawlers who’d breached her system would not only take all her supplies, they’d find her. And she wasn’t going to let that happen.

Strapping on her holster, she filled every pocket with ammo. Her night vision goggles rested on her head, and she made sure she had the shotgun loaded and ready. Most of the nightcrawlers carried semi-automatic weapons, but she’d observed that they were wildly inaccurate with them. She, however, never missed. Solid, old-fashioned shooting practice had served her well. She’d have to move her apartment after this, because she couldn’t stand the smell their decomposing bodies would make after she killed them. After all, she couldn’t very well dump them over the balcony, because the ground level nightcrawlers would grow curious about the person who killed one of their own and try to track her down.

They would find her. The proof was in her kitchen, crawlers chortling as they ransacked her hard-earned freedom. She glanced at her backpack. She could run, hide. Glancing at her closet, she weighed her options. Push open the overhead hatch in the closet and pull herself into the tunnel she created, or stay and fight. Fighting was risky. There could be other crawlers in the building. Once her security had been breached, other crawlers would follow this group. Still, she wanted to kill them. Plain and simple. They’d pay for destroying her peace, her haven. Her very means of survival.

The doorknob to her bedroom rattled. She’d installed security locks worthy of a top secret facility. They couldn’t open the door, but they could blow it to smithereens if they had the means. She had to decide this very moment. Slip all the locks open and begin firing – or run for the escape hatch.

“Hey, let us in,” one of the crawlers shouted. “If you ain’t dead, we’ll show you a good time!” He sounded half drunk. Shay wondered where they’d found alcohol.

Too much time thinking, she told herself. Get out of your head and act, she commanded. Turning to her bed, she grabbed the mystery she’d been reading and stuffed it in her survival backpack. Within seconds, she’d closed the closet door behind her, removed the panel in the ceiling, and tossed her weapon and backpack over her head. Leaping, she grabbed the edge of the hole and strong-armed her way up and into the darkness. Breathing hard, she slid the wooden panel back over the hole. She’d stay where she was until she was sure they’d gone away, then she’d inch her way through the air ducts to the ladder she’d found that rimmed the elevator shaft. It would take her to the building’s basement, and from there, she’d decide on her next steps. One thing was for sure, she would die before she allowed herself to become a nightcrawler, gnawing human bones from long-dead bodies. Her arms were shaking and her feet throbbed by the time she reached the bottom of the ladder.

The building’s maintenance crew had a small office in one corner of the cavernous basement. Otherwise, the basement was filled with chicken-wire enclosed cages used by residents to store their luggage, their Christmas ornaments, furniture they couldn’t bear to toss. She thought of holing up in the office, but if the crawlers got this far, that was the first place they’d look for her. Wandering up one aisle then down another, she decided to settle in a cage that held an enormous old armoire tucked in the back and several other huge, solid wood pieces of furniture from a hundred years ago, if not more. Nothing in the cage was useful to a crawler. Using her pocket knife, she popped the lock and made sure that when she replaced it, it would look as if it hadn’t been opened.

Her night vision goggles were giving her a headache. For the moment, she was safe. Opening the armoire, she decided it was big enough for her to lie down on the bottom. Draping her backpack over a wooden hanger, she pulled out her book and her water bottle. With her shotgun propped in the corner, she made sure her extra ammo was handy before she allowed herself to relax for a few seconds. Using a trick she’d invented when the world was exploding around her and she desperately needed to sleep, she mentally put herself in the fictional town of Danbury Hills. In her mind, she walked its sidewalks, scuffed the falling maple leaves, and stopped at the drugstore to buy a cup of tea, Earl Grey. Here, she was safe, the world was sane, and she had never seen a nightcrawler eating another human. All the tension and fear of the past half hour melted away, and Shay slept. And slept. And slept.

The nightcrawlers spent days breaking into every apartment. None of them held the treasures that Shay’s held, so they figured whoever lived in the apartment with all the food had to be around somewhere. After all, they had posted guards on all the entrances, so no one was getting in or out without their knowledge. When they got to the basement, they sliced through the chicken wire cages, finding nothing to eat or kill with, until they got bored with the whole thing.

Shay felt happy for the first time since the end of the world. She helped Molly solve the murder of a famous literary sleuth in the Rare Book Room of Danbury Hills’ lone library. She listened to Dani play the piano, and even gave lovelorn Sheriff Jim advice on how to woo librarian Molly. Shay had no burning desire to wake up. The nightcrawlers had done her a favor. She’d known she’d have to make a choice, and she did. She stayed in Danbury Hills.