The Complex (26 page)

“You can’t…die tonight. Now…prop me up against…that car… and…find my gun…”

Nodding, the Exit does as he asks. Grady moans, biting his lip as the Exit lifts him from the ground and carries him over to the car. Caleb ducks down and retrieves the gun, holding it with an expression of awe. Terri snatches it away from him and hands it to the Exit.

“Get going,” he tells them. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Nodding, Terri grabs Caleb’s hand and leads him toward the searchlights.

“You, too,” the Exit tells Stephanie.

She hesitates, then leans down and kisses Grady on the top of his head. “Thank you.”

He smiles. “That’s a…nice way for an…old guy like me…to go out. Kiss from a…pretty lady.”

Stephanie’s face twists with grief. She rushes away, sobbing. She bends down and grabs her weapon. Her shoulders hitch as she then runs after Terri and Caleb.

Tick Tock roars. The Exit glances behind them and sees the mob surge forward.

“Go…” Grady urges.

The Exit hands him the gun. Then he turns, searching for the scattered bullets.

“There’s no time,” Grady insists. “I’m loaded. It will be enough.”

“I was wrong,” the Exit tells him.

Grady looks up at him quizzically.

“I was wrong,” the Exit repeats. “I thought it would be different tonight. I thought that I wouldn’t need a sacrifice to save everyone this time.”

Grady stares at him for a moment. Then he coughs.

“Anybody ever…tell you…you’re a weird little fucker… Mendez?”

Smiling, the Exit reaches down and pats his head. “Thank you, Grady.”

Nodding, Grady raises the gun with one trembling hand and points it at the onrushing horde.

The Exit runs after the others. He flinches when he hears the first gunshot behind him, but he doesn’t turn around to look.

It isn’t until his vision grows blurry that he realizes he is crying.

Twenty-Four - Stephanie, The Exit, Terri, and Caleb: City Limits

Stephanie hears four shots as she runs, echoing over the enraged cries of their pursuers. She doesn’t turn around, but she flinches when she hears Grady cry out in pain. Then, his cries are lost, buried beneath the others—but those are not cries of pain. They are cries of savage joy and exultation. And of rage.

She leaps over a body sprawled in the road—a dead nun, still dressed in her full habit. Two dinner forks stick out of her eyes. Laughter wells up inside her but she forces it down. She remembers a joke from grade school—what’s black and white and red and runs into walls? A nun with forks in her eyes.

She glances at a light post to her right and sees a man dangling from a noose made from an extension cord. His legs kick feebly, but she convinces herself that it’s just the wind making them move.

The bank and the used car lot to her left are both on fire. Stephanie takes a deep breath and holds it as she barrels through a cloud of smoke drifting across the street. Her eyes sting, but she pushes on until the smoke passes. When she exhales, her chest aches.

Grady’s last words run through her mind. He called her a pretty lady. That was what he saw her as. That was his perception. She sobs, feeling gratitude and fear and happiness and regret all at the same time.

She runs past destroyed houses and wrecked cars and dead bodies, fleeing toward the lights growing ever brighter and bigger ahead of them, and thinks about Grady’s words again. They give her strength, and strength is what she needs, because her lungs are burning and her legs feel like she’s running through cement. Her head pounds in time with her pulse.

He called me a pretty lady…

She wonders how the others perceive her. She thinks about how she perceived them, before tonight. Mrs. Carlucci, for example. She’d always been the old lady next door, the one who acted nice, but also a little nervous. Before tonight, Stephanie had always assumed that nervousness was a silent form of disapproval over her transition, but she’s not so sure about that anymore. And never in a million years would she have thought the old lady would be so resourceful in the face of danger. The way she’d helped, fearlessly going up against their attackers…

Stephanie realizes that her initial perceptions of Mrs. Carlucci were all wrong. She was wrong about a lot of them. Sam, for instance. And Turo. Yes, Shaggy had behaved exactly as she’d expected him to, even calling her a he-she at one point, but Turo had been surprisingly kind and accepting—in his way. And Sam… Sam had called her Steph. She still thinks she’d prefer to be Rose, but Steph felt good. It felt…acceptable.

All of them are gone now. Gone just as she’d gotten to know them.

She hates that this night—this hell—was the catalyst for her to finally break those misconceptions, and truly get to know the people around her.

She hears someone stumble behind her, followed by a gasp from Terri. Stephanie turns around and sees Caleb sprawled on the sidewalk, hands splayed. He’s picking himself up, bottom lip puckering as he notices a bleeding scrape on his knee. Then Mendez appears beside the boy and, without pausing, scoops him up and continues running, passing by both Stephanie and Terri.

“Hurry,” he pants. “They’re gaining on us!”

Stephanie sees that he is right. Grady may have taken a few of their pursuers with him, but their numbers haven’t thinned. The naked horde charges after them, filling the street. Tick Tock lopes along behind the procession, arms outstretched as if to welcome them in his embrace.

Stephanie turns and runs. She grits her teeth and focuses only on breathing. She passes Terri, draws alongside Mendez, and then she’s in the lead again, racing toward the perimeter.

The spotlights fill the road ahead of them now. A wall of sandbags has been erected. Behind the wall is a line of military vehicles, fire trucks, and police cars parked nose to nose and blocking the road. Uniformed guardsmen and various members of the local and state police stand in a phalanx between the sandbags and the vehicles. She notices that there are some civilians among them, as well, helping to man the post. All of them—civilian, law enforcement, and military—are armed. Their weapons are raised, and they’re shouting something, but Stephanie’s pulse is so loud in her ears that she can’t understand them.

She screams, urging herself forward as a sudden pain jolts through the calf of her right leg. It burns, coursing through her entire body. Behind her, the cries of the horde grow louder. Ahead, the soldier’s shouts do the same.

It occurs to her then how they must look. She, Terri, Caleb, and Mendez are naked and dirty, running ahead of a naked and dirty mob. She tosses the rebar aside, presenting herself as weaponless, and hoping that they will notice.

See us for who we are,
she thinks as they near the blockade.
See us for who we really are…

One of the guardsmen shouts into a bullhorn. They’re close enough now that she can see their expressions. Everything behind them is lost in the glare of the spotlights, but she can see their faces clearly, and their weapons.

Weapons that are pointed at her and her neighbors.

Faces and expressions that mirror the fear and desperation she feels.

“We’re not them,” she shrieks. “Don’t shoot. We’re not like them!”

The horde are right behind them now. Stephanie can hear their grunts of exertion, the sound of their teeth snapping, their weapons clanging.

See us for who we are…

See us for who we are…

See us for who we are…

She’s still thinking it when the first gunshot rings out.

Afterword

I got the idea for this short novel when a naked man rode a bicycle past my home one morning in 2013.

I used to live in a remote cabin nestled on a mountaintop in the Susquehanna River bottoms. There were a few other homes in the valley below me, as well as a winding, twisting, one-lane road that seemed to flood out every time it rained—after which the valley would fill with fog. It was an eerie, spooky place, as rural as you can get for Pennsylvania, and perfectly suited to both my writing and my lifestyle. My friends affectionately referred to the area as Shoggoth Town. If you’re a regular listener to my podcast, then you’ve no doubt heard them talk about it on many occasions. And yes, I’ll admit, Shoggoth Town was an apt name, but I didn’t mind. I liked living there. I liked having privacy and space and a backyard full of black bears and deer. The few neighbors were all fairly normal, and I knew them all quite well.

I was awake at five in the morning the day I saw the naked man. This wasn’t abnormal. Since I’m at my most productive early in the day, I always get up at five. I was still in bed, talking to my girlfriend on the phone and getting ready to exercise and then start writing, when I happened to glance out the window. There, down below, on that twisted, narrow little road, was a naked man on an old ten-speed bicycle. I paused, making sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, and verifying that I was indeed awake. I asked my girlfriend to verify this, too, which she did. Then I told her what I was seeing. She took it in stride.

Deciding to investigate, I told her that I’d call her back.

I hopped out of bed, clad only in a pair of boxer shorts, grabbed a pistol from my gun safe (deciding it would be prudent to approach this naked stranger with some precaution) and headed out the door. My driveway was a slim, rutted gravel road that wound down the mountain. As I walked down it, I kept catching glimpses of the nude bicyclist through the trees. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the bottom, he was gone.

At the time, it seemed like every week the mainstream media were reporting on another case where some drug-crazed nut tore off his or her clothes and ran rampant through the streets. In most of these cases, the perpetrator attempted to break into homes or vehicles or places of business. In several cases, they attacked other people. Several victims died.

Walking back up the mountain, still wearing my boxer shorts, I started thinking about what would happen if there was suddenly a horde of such fiends. Then that idea went to live in the back of my brain, which is where all of my ideas go. The good ones eventually get written down. The bad ones dissipate like dreams.

Life went on.

In early 2014, my cabin and many of the other homes in the valley were destroyed during a series of severe winter storms. Meteorologists called it the Polar Vortex. We called it Hell. We’d survived multiple floods and blizzards over the years, but the Polar Vortex did us in. My place was pretty much uninhabitable afterward, and after seeing the impact the situation had on my youngest son, I decided that maybe a remote mountaintop cabin overlooking Shoggoth Town wasn’t the best place to raise a seven-year old. So, he and I packed up our belongings (except for the stuff destroyed in the storms) and moved into an apartment complex in a nearby town. My son was much happier with this living arrangement, and I was happy that he was happy.

We’d been in the complex for about a month, and I was smoking a cigar one day, and thinking about how I viewed my new neighbors (none of whom I really knew) and how they viewed me (a new tenant whom they didn’t know) versus how I viewed myself and how they probably viewed themselves.

Then I remembered the naked man on the bicycle.

And that’s how this novel came to be—a story about our self-perceptions versus other people’s perceptions of us. And about how we don’t really know our neighbors anymore. And about deranged naked people on a killing spree.

Javier Mendez, aka The Exit, has appeared in several of my short stories—“I Am An Exit”, “This Is Not An Exit” and “Exit Strategies”. He also appears in my novel,
The Seven
. An alternate reality version of Grady Hicks has previously appeared in a short story called “Customer Service Letter Written by an Angry Old Man on Christmas Eve”. Hannibal the cat previously appeared in a short story called “Halves”. A few paragraphs of the introductory chapter with Sam were cannibalized from a short story I wrote called “The Eleventh Muse”.

Some of you will no doubt notice that I departed from my usual style of narrative voice, and chose something different for this novel. I’m not sure why that happened. It just did. That’s how the story wanted to be told, so that’s how I told it.

Writers are weird as fuck.

It’s also worth noting that, just like in many of my other novels, while most of the towns and locations in this book are real, I have taken certain geographical liberties with them. So don’t go looking for the Pine Village Apartment Complex in Red Lion, PA. You won’t find it. And if you did, you wouldn’t like what comes creeping across the parking lot after dark.

As always, thank you for your support. If you keep reading them, I’ll keep writing them.

Brian Keene

August 2015