The others arrived.
“What the hell is happening?” Nicole yelled, coming into the room.
Before Alex could explain what Jared had been doing—provoking if not downright attacking Kyle—Jared spoke up.
“Alex got that kid to attack me!” He glared across the room at the screaming child. “He’s crazy! He shouldn’t be here! I was just trying to talk to him, and he went nuts on me! Look at my face!” He showed his fresh scratches and the trickle of blood coming from his nose. “He’s fucked! Attacking people for no reason!”
“It wasn’t for no reason! He—”
“It doesn’t matter! Shut up, you’re only making him worse!” Nicole patted Kyle on the head, trying to calm him. He screamed nonsense and tried to bite her.
“Jesus, he’s trying to bite her now!” Jared shouted, now on his feet. “He’s one of those fucking dead guys! We gotta get rid of him!”
“He’s not going anywhere! He’s fine! You’re an idiot, and you shouldn’t have kicked him and—”
“Alex!” Nicole yelled, then quickly fell into a whisper with the same amount of threat in it. “Stop it. Now. Get out of here. Now. You’re making this worse.”
“But—”
“Stop.”
Alex put Kyle down, and Nicole held him the same way, making sure he wouldn’t get hurt or hurt anyone else.
“Yeah, Alec,” Jared sneered, “get out of here so we can—”
“You too, Jared,” Nicole said, calmly. “You’re just as bad. Go. Everyone go. He needs to quiet down.”
Jared looked at each of them before stomping away. “Come on, David. Let’s go get rid of those dead fuckers outside.”
Alex wanted to smirk at Jared’s little tantrum, but instead he was frozen, looking into David’s conflicted eyes. David looked at his sister, then at Alex, then quickly followed Jared.
DAVID
“I do not get those guys,” Jared complained. “They treat me like shit, but they have some fuckin’ crazy kid, and he’s, what? A saint?”
David shrugged. He felt uneasy about the whole blowout that had just happened upstairs. Jared had even frightened him a little, but he knew he didn’t want to be in the situation any longer, which is why he was now outside doing something he had been dreading for days.
Also, he didn’t want to look lame in front of Jared. And they hadn’t seen any mudmen—other than the one that Alex claimed to have seen at Hannah’s house—in a few days. Things might even be clearing up, getting better.
“How do you put up with that bitch?” Jared asked, as he grabbed onto one of the piked mudmen and pushed it off.
“What?” David asked, confused. He hadn’t been paying attention to most of what Jared had been saying. He was still afraid to touch a mudman with a board, so he was both awestruck and disgusted that Jared did it with his hands. At least he was wearing gloves.
Jared motioned over his shoulder to the upstairs window and shook his head with disgust. “Them!”
“Oh,” David said, looking up at the window. He saw Alex looking out from the bedroom. “Them. Yeah. They’re ...” He didn’t know what to say. Clearly Jared didn’t like them, but they were his friends, not to mention his sister. “They’re not that bad.”
“That’s bullshit,” Jared said, as he wiped some of the black goop that covered his gloves on to his heavy coat.
He took his gloves off and walked around the pikes to the crumpled mudmen. He crouched down beside the one he had just pushed off.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” Jared replied with a sneer, as he dropped the gloves on the ground and pulled back the creature’s filth-encrusted coat. “I’m checking to see if this guy has anything good on him.”
“Oh,” David said, trying very hard to not hyperventilate, “Um ... why?”
“Jesus,” Jared said, pulling his hands out and glaring at David. “If it bothers you, just keep an eye on the windows up there. Those shits will want anything good I find. If they don’t know, we can keep it, all right?”
“Oh,” David said, glad to have the excuse to turn away from what he saw as the grossest example of grave-robbing he could think of. “Yeah. Sure ... that makes sense.” He spat out a fake chuckle as he looked up at the window. Alex was no longer watching them.
“I can’t believe you guys left these pieces of shit up here so long,” he heard Jared say from behind him. “They stink like shit. Probably lead a bunch more right to ya. They love the smell of shit. They—” He started screaming.
David jumped and whirled. A mudman had Jared pinned against the barricade; two more were a few feet from them. Jared screamed as he tried to shove the thing away, but because of all the blood and filth on the ground beneath him, it was a losing battle; he couldn’t get any traction.
David froze, expecting at any moment to watch his new friend get eaten right in front of him.
It ended with a quick THUD and a SPLAT!
The sound made David realize he had closed his eyes, though he didn’t remember doing so. When he opened them, Jared was still pinned against the barricade and the mudman still stood over him.
No. No, he realized, the mudman now lay on top of the one Jared had been looting. It was Alex who stood in front of him. He held a board; one end splattered in blood where he had just crushed the head of the mudman attacking Jared.
“Get inside,” Alex yelled. “Now!”
Jared jumped at the first words, then scrambled to his feet, slipping in the entrails that had spilled under the barricade. When he was around it, he bolted, tears streaming down his face.
David stood, still frozen, as he watched Alex slowly move around the barricade, keeping his eyes on the
