unmistakable groan of metal giving way.
A chorus of shouts went up behind me. I heard a howl so close and full-throated that every hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up.
Someone shouted behind me. I took my eyes from the barricaded door. There in the doorway of the kitchen was a blank shape that resolved into a wolf, mouth open, eyes burning.
“It’s Myerson!” Wilkins shouted.
The Army private, who was standing just outside the kitchen, screamed. Instead of firing his .44, he froze and stared up into the wolf’s face.
Myerson lowered his head and took the private’s shoulder into it, raking his claws across the young man’s chest. Blood spurted everywhere at once.
The private screamed, then went limp.
Myerson shrieked and fell upon the dead body, slashing it to bits with the razors of his teeth and claws. He licked at every drop of blood, shredding clothes like crepe paper, devouring entrails, muscle, and tissue. The man’s exposed rib cage was cleaned dry. I watched in sickened fascination.
The wolf fell but another appeared behind it. Yellow eyes wide with rage and lust, it fell on the new corpse, tearing at it with its teeth.
“Jesus, they dug into the kitchen!” Wilkins shouted. Another dark shape dropped down into the small room.
A fusillade of gunfire erupted into the doorway of the kitchen. Backing into the barricade of cabinets and furniture, I fired twice, pausing to reload. When the smoke cleared, three dead beasts, Myerson among them, were piled near the kitchen opening. Another wolf had dropped into the kitchen and was already going for the bodies.
I felt the barricade move toward me. The door was being pushed inward.
Someone stumbled in my path, moving toward the kitchen. It was one of the old women. “Rebecca? Rebecca?” she called. I tried to grab her but she screamed when I touched her and stumbled away. A moment later I saw one of the wolves cover her like a cloak and she went down. I saw her friend nearby, a wolf pulling bloodily at her lifeless back.
The pile of furniture heaved behind me, greeted by a bray of victory from the partially open doorway. I was being pushed to the center of the room. I loaded my shotgun and fired twice, dropping one wolf that had clawed its way out of the kitchen.
Someone pulled me down as a wolf leaped from the pile of chairs and lockers covering the door. It was Pettis. He shot the thing as it landed.
“Come with me,” Pettis said, clutching my arm.
I followed. The room was dense with smoke and the smell of carnage. He pulled me toward the far corner, adjacent to where the line of lockers had been. Behind us, I heard a tremendous crash as the last of the barricade was breached.
“Get in,” he said.
I saw nothing, what looked like blank wall. The roar and stink of death behind me grew louder—
He shoved me and I hit what should have been the wall, but it suddenly opened and I kept going. I felt like Alice, tumbling through the mirror into the looking glass world. I saw blank faces staring at me. Then there was darkness; my head was forced down by a low ceiling. Someone cursed at me under his breath.
“Sit,” I was ordered.
I squatted. Someone was directly under me. Impatient hands moved me to one side and I sat. Cold metal met my back. I reached up; I could just touch the ceiling from a sitting position, making it a scant four feet above me. I touched gingerly out to my right; there was a warm body a few inches from me, not as tall as I. Over its head I felt the wall, very close. On the other side was the person who had sat me down. I imagined the wall was close to whoever it was. Maybe four feet wide. Six feet long. I thanked God I wasn’t a claustrophobic.
“Anyone else left?” the body to my left whispered in a hoarse British accent; it sounded like Doc.
The one to my right, a young voice—the girl Amy—whimpered in reply.
“Don’t worry,” Doc said, reaching over me to touch the girl. “He’ll find her.”
The sounds of battle raging outside were greatly muffled.
“Doc?” I ventured. The body to my right told me in a fierce whisper, “Quiet.”
There was a grating noise and then blinding light in front of me. I smelled blood. The light was blocked by someone crouching. A figure fell onto me and darkness returned. I felt wetness on my arm. I sucked in my breath in sudden fear, but Pettis’s voice said calmly, “She wasn’t bitten.”
“Where the hell are we?” I asked.
“In the morgue they built into the shelter. The door is solid steel. The wolves don’t know it’s here. I suggest we don’t talk. Whatever air we have now is what we have until morning.”
“Cowboy,” Doc’s low, patient accent came from beside me, “are you sure they won’t smell Moira’s blood?”
There was a pause. “There’s enough out there to keep them busy all night.”
“Are you quite sure she wasn’t bitten?” Doc had softened his voice, but it still sounded clinical and cold.
There was a longer pause. The girl’s hand passed over me to stroke her mother’s face, which lay in my lap.
“It’s all right, Cowboy,” Doc said. The clinical tone had bled away. “I assume the others are dead?”
“Yes. No more talk,” Pettis answered.
Intimately close, each alone with his thoughts and nightmares, with the sounds of distant, muffled death filtering into our steel tomb, we waited.
CHAPTER 14
Elegy
We waited forever.
In our morgue, we breathed shallowly. My own lungs settled into a rhythm that, after a time, became my sole attention. My head grew light, but still I puffed in, puffed out, like an emphysemic.
At one point, I drifted into sleep, and dreamed. In the dream my son and wife beckoned me from the doorway of our house. I was walking up the steps, toward them, and behind them, in the house, I heard what sounded like the television on, very loud. It was Jimmy Rogers’s voice, shouting in his confident drawl, “We need Proctor and Baines real bad. Proctor and Baines.” I heard him spit, and then the television got very loud and then very soft, and I distinctly heard the click of it being shut off. My wife and son stopped smiling. I had nearly reached them. Their smiles returned, only they weren’t smiles anymore. Their mouths were filled with long teeth, and their faces became indistinct, pushed out, longer. As I reached to embrace them they took me and began to tear at my flesh with their teeth and hands…
The dream ended, and I became aware of my breathing again. In, out. In, out. Only now, the puffing was ineffective; I needed more air. I felt like a drowning man reaching for a receding surface.
Shallow breathing was turning to gasping around me. Pettis’s daughter labored for breath; Doc, whose lungs must have been filled with years of nicotine stains, was doing no better.
“What…time is it?” Doc gasped.
A round smudge of fluorescence glowed into life directly in front of me; in its light I made out Pettis’s features greenly. He let go of the button on his watch and the green light disappeared.
“Four-sixteen.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Don’t talk,” Pettis ordered.
We gasped on. I began to hallucinate, dreaming awake. I saw wolf faces floating before me, mouths snapping like steel traps, howling, laughing…
Finally, at five o’clock, Pettis announced, “I’m…going to open the door for a minute.”
“Yes,” Doc begged.
