Free Web NovelChapter 29: The Silence On The Other End
/*Third Person POV*/
The house had gone quiet, but that quiet did not feel anything like safe.
Wind found its way through the shattered kitchen window somewhere below and carried a faint metallic smell.
A cabinet door downstairs tapped softly against its frame, over and over, never quite swinging shut.
Farther off, past the walls of this particular house, gunfire of a hunting rifle cracked twice in quick succession before it stopped completely.
A scream answered it from somewhere distant, then another joined in, human this time, shorter too, cut off too fast to be anything good, and after that nothing followed at all.
Blood covered most of the hallway wall, still wet enough to catch the weak light from the florescent bulbs lighting up the house.
Hand and Foot prints crossed and overlapped across the tile floor until the trails blurred into one continuous red smear running from room to room.
In master bedroom in the ground floor, the storage chest sat exactly where Nikki had left it with three bullet holes punched through near the top, blood smeared in long uneven streaks across the lid.
For a long stretch of seconds, nothing in the room moved at all.
Then the lid lifted an inch with a low, groaning creak.
A pair of wide brown eyes appeared in the gap first, scanning the visible sliver of room.
Beside them, a second pair of eyes watched the same gap, green and unblinking, set into a face covered in a patchwork of orange, black and white fur.
Neither set of eyes moved for several seconds. Only after confirming that nothing in the room had shifted did the lid finally rise the rest of the way.
Kara climbed out slowly, the 1301 shotgun trembling in both hands.
She held it wrong, elbows too high, the stock not properly seated against her shoulder, all her fingers wrapped around the grip instead of the index being near the trigger.
Tikki dropped out behind her without a sound, landing low with his tail fully puffed and his ears pinned flat against his skull.
He pressed his side against her leg the moment his paws hit the floor, and neither of them moved away from the other.
Kara swallowed hard.
"Get to the Ascender..." Kara breathed to herself. "Drive... Meet him outside the slums."
"This is stupid," she whispered.
"Mea..." Tikki said, sounding entirely too supportive.
Kara crossed to the bedroom doorway and eased her head out into the hall.
The kitchen sat to her left, the back window completely gone, the door hanging open on one hinge and swaying slightly whenever the wind reached it.
To her right, the hallway stretched toward the front of the house, and at the end of it sat the Ascender, its passenger door still wide open and blocking the front entrance exactly where they had wedged it.
And Kara looked away from it almost immediately and inctinctively.
But the shape of it stayed pressed behind her eyes regardless.
Dark smears covered the steel mesh from one end to the other. Strings of something pale and wet hung from the bent diamond pattern near the windshield frame.
A clump of hair clung to the side mirror, while the passenger seat had gone completely red on the inside.
Kara pressed her back against the wall hard as her stomach rolled over once, slow and heavy.
She had been sitting inside that vehicle while all of it happened, less than a foot from the windshield while Nikki fired through the open frame for what felt like an hour straight.
She had been too afraid and adrenalized back then to understand any of it properly.
And now that the she had eased enough that she could finally see what she had actually been sitting next to, Kara froze.
"Nikki," she whispered, not really to anyone.
He was still out there somewhere in this.
Alone, moving through streets full of the exact same thing that had painted that window red.
"Mea?"
Kara looked down. Tikki sat against her ankle, staring up with wide green eyes that seemed to ask the same question she was asking herself.
"Just a second..." she breathed.
Her grip tightened around the shotgun as she straightened her spine, pushed off the wall, and stepped into the hallway proper, every footstep landing wrong on a floor that pulled faintly at the soles of her shoes wherever blood had started drying.
The smell reached her before she got close enough to see anything new.
Copper first, then something rotten underneath it, then something sweet that had gone bad in a way that made her throat feel sticky.
But she made herself look inside the open door anyway.
Two infected sat wedged between the front seats, crushed together in a position no living body could have folded itself into willingly.
One had both legs bent at angles legs were never built to bend. Its jaw hung loose from the rest of its skull, attached by little more than a thin strip of torn skin.
The other had an eye hanging halfway out of its socket, the remaining eye fixed somewhere past Kara’s shoulder, unmoving, unblinking.
Kara immediately doubled over before she could stop herself and threw up onto the ground beside the open door.
Her eyes watered, throat burned. And when she finally straightened back up, the two of them were still exactly where they had been, still exactly as wrong as they had been a moment earlier.
She needed the driver’s and the passenger’s seat clear, and there was nobody else here to clear it.
"I-I can’t..." she said quietly to the empty hallway, half choking on her own spit, and then ignored herself, because there genuinely wasn’t another option sitting on the table.
Kara stepped closer, heart hammering, slow enough that each step felt like its own separate decision.
Grab the collar. Pull. That was the entire plan.
Keeping the gun raised with a hand, she reached the other inside, fingers spreading toward torn fabric at the nearest infected’s shoulder, close enough now that she could feel the temperature difference coming off the body.
And just as her hand came inches to the collar-
-GHRRAAA-!
A maw of bloodied teeth snapped at her hand out of the back seats.
Kara yelped and threw herself backward, landing hard on the floor while the shotgun clattered away across the wet tile while the infected scrambled forward across the front seats with horrible speed, climbing through the gap between the headrests, shoving past the two already wedged there, out through the open passenger door before straight at her.
Her body refused to move. Her mind refused to produce a single useful thought.
And just as the infected reached her, a gray and orange shape slammed into the thing’s face from the side.
Tikki struck first, claws driving in around its eyes, and the infected staggered backward under the impact before one bloodied hand found his fur and closed around it.
The infected lifted the thrashing cat by a fistful of fur and slammed him into the floor hard enough that Kara felt the impact through the boards beneath her.
-Bash-! frёeωebɳovel.com
Kara heard the sound from where she lay frozen, and the sound making her stomach clench at the force behind it.
Tikki let out a sound she had never heard a cat make, broken and high and wretched, and then somehow, impossibly, Tikki scrambled back onto his feet and bolted for the stairs.
The infected went after him without hesitation, abandoning her completely now that something faster was running away in front of it.
For one full second Kara simply lay there, watching the space where they had both disappeared, her body unable to decide what came next.
"Tikki!"
She scrambled upright and lunged for the shotgun, fingers closing around it just as movement burst from the kitchen doorway behind her.
"Fuck!"
The second infected hit her before she finished turning around, slamming into her chest and driving her straight back down onto the bloody tile with the full weight of its body pinning her there.
The shotgun ended up wedged sideways between them, the only thing standing between her face and the thing’s open bloody mouth.
Its lips had been torn away almost entirely, exposing gums and teeth stained dark, and its breath, rotten and hot, hit her directly in the face as it lunged for her throat and found the shotgun barrel instead.
Teeth scraped metal with a sound that went straight through the deepest parts of her very being, shaking it all down to its foundations.
The Infected’s free hand found her neck a second later, nails dragging four long gashes across her neck, spilling warm blood across her collar.
But Kara did not scream.
Every part of her wanted to, but Nikki’s voice surfaced fast enough in her memory to override the instinct, telling her that noise brought more of them.
So she clenched her jaw instead and let the tears come silently while she fought to keep the barrel between them.
The thing was stronger than her by a significant margin, and it seemed to know that as it pressed down harder with every second while its teeth kept scraping the metal closer to her hands.
Her arms started to shake from the strain. Her elbows bent another half inch despite everything she did to stop it.
But slowly, she got one knee up between their bodies, then the other.
And shoved with everything her legs had left.
The infected flew backward off her and hit the floor hard, already scrambling to push itself upright before she had even finished rolling onto her side.
But it was enough time for Kara to swung it up without bothering to aim, squeezed her eyes shut, and-
-Dich-!
The shot came out quieter than she expected, the suppressor doing exactly what Nikki had promised it would, though the result inside her own skull was anything but quiet.
The infected’s head came apart in a spray of bone, blood, and brain, painting the wall behind it red as the body dropped limp onto the floor.
The recoil slammed backward into her shoulder hard enough to tear the shotgun completely out of her hands, sending it skidding several feet across the floor.
Kara stared at the body for a single breath, chest heaving yet barely able to breath.
Then she remembered.
"Tikki."
She scrambled after the shotgun, snatched it up, and ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time despite legs no longer feeling entirely like her own.
"Tikki!"
Scratching reached her from somewhere down the upstairs hallway, along with the low rasp of something heavy moving across a wooden floor.
And her mind supplied the worst possible images before she could stop it.
Then-
-HISSS-!!
A hiss sounded somewhere ahead, sharp and furious, and unmistakably alive.
Kara nearly went weak with relief on the spot, before pushing through the nearest door in a blind sprint.
The infected stood in the middle of the room with both hands raised toward a tall wooden cupboard, reaching, grabbing at air, and reaching again.
Tikki crouched on top of it with every hair on his body standing on end, his ears flat, his back arched so high he looked twice his normal size, his eyes wide enough to show white all around the edges.
Every time the reaching hand got close, his claws flashed downward.
"Tikki!" Kara breathed, her voice cracking as she stepped into the doorway.
Tikki’s head snapped toward her voice, just for an instant, and the infected began turning to follow his gaze.
And this time, Kara raised the shotgun, actually sighted down the barrel this time, and fired.
-Dich-!
The infected dropped immediately, its skull striking the floor with a wet crack that almost echoed the small room.
The recoil shoved her backward a full step, hard enough to stagger her, but she kept her grip on the stock this time, white knuckled and shaking.
"It’s okay..." she whispered, lowering the barrel toward the floor, looking up at Tikki.
"It’s me... It’s Kara." She took one slow step toward the cupboard. "You’re okay now."
For a moment Tikki actually seemed to settle, his back lowering an inch, his ears lifting slightly out of their flattened position.
But the very next second, every hair on his body shot straight back up again, his eyes went even wider, and he launched himself off the cupboard directly toward her face with a sound somewhere between a screech and a roar.
Kara flinched hard, hands coming before her face, eyes instinctively snapping shut, certain for one horrible instant that something in him had finally broken.
But Tikki’s launch sailed him straight past her.
And the very next second, she heard something behind her grunted as eight pounds of furious slammed into its chest.
Kara spun around in time to see a third infected stagger backward with Tikki already climbing up its body, claws raking, teeth bared, hissing without pause.
The thing grabbed at him blindly, caught a fistful of fur, and yanked, and seeing that happen to him for the second time erased every trace of fear left in Kara’s body and put something else in its place entirely.
"Get the fuck off him!"
She raised the shotgun and fired without thinking about the recoil or posture at all, all of it barely mattering against everything else happening inside her chest.
The buckshot folded the infected at the center of its torso and dropped it instantly, and Tikki fell with it, hitting the floor a half second later in a small heap of fur.
"Tikki!"
Kara dropped the shotgun and crossed the room on her knees, reaching him before the body beside him had even finished settling.
For one terrible heartbeat he did not move at all.
And Kara felt her entire world narrow to that single motionless patch of fur.
Then he twitched, before pushing himself unsteadily up onto all four legs, and looked at her with eyes that had gone enormous, confused, and comnpletely terrified.
"Weao!" Tikki cried, his voice cracking in the middle of that single syllable.
He stumbled straight into her arms and she caught him immediately, pulling him against her chest hard enough to feel his ribs through her hands.
"It’s okay!" she whispered, and her own voice was shaking. "You’re okay... You’re so brave. You’re okay..."
Tikki trembled against her, violently, his claws digging into the fabric of her jacket and refusing to let go.
Kara held him just as tightly as tears welled up in her eyes, quiet and careful, both of them too afraid of the silence around them to make any real sound at all.
They stayed like that for several long seconds, neither one willing to be the first to move.
Then Nikki’s voice surfaced again in her memory, calm and certain, warning her of the bites.
Kara’s eyes snapped open the very same instant.
"Bites!" The word came out as barely more than air. "Oh my god, bites!"
She pulled back just far enough to hold Tikki at arm’s length, scrambled to her feet without letting go of him, and hurried into the small study down the hall where a desk lamp still burned warm and yellow over an empty chair.
She set him down gently on the desk under the light.
"Tikki, stay."
He stayed exactly where she put him, watching her with eyes that seemed to understand precisely what she was about to do.
Her hands shook badly enough that she had to stop twice and steady them before she could properly part his fur.
She checked his neck first, then his chest, then under each front leg, then his stomach and both sides, working through every inch of him with fingers that refused to stop trembling.
And Tikki cooperated through all of it, holding still whenever she lifted a paw, rolling gently onto his back when she needed to check underneath him, watching her face the entire time rather than her hands.
She checked his neck again. Then his chest again. Then everything else a second time, and then a third time after that, because being certain once had not felt like enough.
Only when she found nothing wrong did she finally took in a proper breath.
"No bites..." she breathed, the words coming out shaky. "Okay. Fuck. No bites. You’re okay. Fuck..."
She gathered him gently against her chest again and pressed her face into his fur, and for the first time since climbing out of that chest, something in her loosened that was not quite relief but came close enough to count.
"Nikki?" She tried reaching the only semblance of stability she knew though the comms.
But nothing came back through it.
"Nikki, you there?"
Still nothing answered her from the other end.
And slowly a cold weight began to settle low in her stomach, growing heavier with every second that passed.
"Nikki?"
Her voice cracked clean through the middle of his name this time.
But the silence on the other end did not change at all, while underneath the fading adrenaline and the bites she hadn’t found and the bodies still cooling on the floor below, a new and much quieter fear began to take root, one that had nothing to do with infected at all.
