The Walls of Lemuria (2 page)

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Keo said. “I’ve seen worse. Hey, Delia, look at me. I’ve seen worse.”

She either believed the lie, or she wanted to. Either way, her crying lessened, but her face remained terror-stricken, her cheeks covered in tears. “I’m scared, Keo…”

“I know,” he nodded. “So am I.”

“You too?” she asked, as if she couldn’t believe it. Lovely brown eyes watched him closely again.

“Yes.” He smiled, hoping it was convincing. “This…isn’t normal. It’s perfectly okay to be scared, right?”

She nodded hesitantly.

“But we’ll get through this, I promise,” he continued. “We’ll wait in here for the cops. I bet someone already called the local PD. How many cops are in Bentley?”

She thought about it. “Six, I think?”

“So at least one or two of them should be on their way by now. Until then, we’re just going to sit tight and wait for them. Okay?”

She nodded with more confidence this time.

“You’re doing good,” he said. “You’re doing really good.”

Keo sneaked a quick look at the towel around her arm. He swore it had gotten even redder since a few seconds ago. How was that possible? It wasn’t, of course. No one could bleed that much from a simple bite wound.

Right. Because all of this makes perfect sense.

“Keo,” Delia said.

“Yes?”

“Can you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

She didn’t answer, because she didn’t have to. Keo did hear it.

It was unmistakable and it seemed to be coming from all around them, from the other motel rooms to their left and right.

Rearview Motel had one floor and it was spread out, with twenty rooms in a long line from one end of the lot to the other. Their room was somewhere in the middle, #11, which gave him a perfect spot to hear the growing noise, like rolling thunder, getting closer and closer, and louder and louder at the same time.

“Keo,” Delia said, her voice dropping to barely a whisper. “Is that…?”

He nodded.

“What’s happening, Keo? What’s happening out there?”

“I don’t know, but we’ll get through this. I promise. We’ll get through this.”

He remained crouched next to her and listened, because it was impossible to ignore. If he pressed his palms against his ears and pushed for all he was worth, he would still hear it.

The screaming.

The people in the other motel rooms were screaming…

They spent the
next two hours inside the bathroom listening to the screaming. Every now and then Keo heard gunshots, but there weren’t enough of them to convince him there was some kind of organized resistance going on. The shots never came from the same location and they sometimes overlapped, which meant the attacks were happening simultaneously across the motel.

There’s more than one of those creatures out there.

How many? Depends. How many rooms?

Too many…

Keo didn’t have his watch with him, but it had to be well after midnight. Two, maybe three in the morning. They had arrived at the Rearview Motel around ten after Delia got off work early at the bar. He had actually waited for her, which had been a first. Four long, agonizing hours of listening to country music and avoiding fights with locals who thought Delia was spending too much time with a stranger. A six-foot-one Asian guy, no less. In this part of Louisiana, that probably made him something of a freak. He wasn’t even supposed to have stopped here, and now he wished he had kept going.

Too late for that. Way too late for that now.

Keo didn’t spend a lot of time regretting things in his life. The fact was, if he had to weigh the night with Delia against everything happening now, it wasn’t even all that hard of a choice—

“Keo,” Delia whispered.

“I hear it,” Keo said.

Or rather, what he
didn’t
hear.

Silence.

The screaming had stopped.

He didn’t think quiet could feel so heavy, but then he had never listened to strangers screaming for the last two hours.

He glanced back at Delia just to make sure it wasn’t all in his head.

She nodded, large brown eyes wide with questions. “Is it over?”

“I don’t know.” He turned back to the door. “I should find out.”

“No, don’t go out there.
It’s
out there.”

“Trust me, I don’t want to go out there, but we need to know what’s happening.”

And you need proper dressings and a doctor,
he thought about adding, but decided she didn’t really need to know that. He had wrapped a fresh towel around her arm only to watch it turn red like the last one. There was no way to actually stop the bleeding, and there was no first-aid kit in the medicine cabinet. And Delia looked painfully pale and seemed to be moving her head with difficulty. More than once, he’d had to check that she was even still breathing as she dozed off.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

She nodded, but even that seemed to take a lot out of her. “Just be careful, okay?”

Keo got up from the floor and looked for a weapon.

What weapon? He was inside the bathroom of a cheap motel room, in a part of the country where the only people who came here were either lost or looking to play hooky from marriage. Or, in his case, had just met an attractive blonde at an impromptu stop.

There weren’t any weapons. Or at least, nothing he would take with him into battle and feel good about.

He finally settled on the stainless steel tension rod holding up the shower curtain. It popped loose with little effort, and Keo swiped off the curtain rings. The rod was adjustable, so all he had to do was twist it and push inward, turning a seventy-two inch stick into a three-foot long weapon.

He gave it a couple of practice swings, pleased with the
whip-whip
sound it made as it sliced through the air. He would have liked something more lethal—a gun, maybe—but beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially ones hiding inside a bathroom in their boxers.

Delia was watching him. Keo couldn’t tell if it was with admiration, fear, or pity. Maybe a little of all three. “Are you really going out there?”

“I have to.” He crouched in front of her. “I have to find out what’s happening out there. I want you to stay in here, and whatever you do, do not open the door for anyone but me. At least for tonight. If I don’t come back—”

“Keo…”

“No, Delia. This is important. If it’s not me, only open the door for the cops. Understand?”

She nodded uncertainly. “Just…be careful.”

“Absolutely. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

He smiled at her, and she tried to return it but came up painfully short. Keo couldn’t help but feel guilty about bringing her here. Where would she be now if he hadn’t picked her up in town? At home, probably. Maybe somewhere else with one of the locals. God knew there had been plenty of them hitting on her, but for whatever reason she had decided he was the guy she would go home with. If it weren’t for him, she would be anywhere but here right now. She would likely be safe and he would be on his way with his week-long vacation.

Live and learn, pal. Live and learn.

He stood up and kissed her on the forehead. “Sit tight.”

She grabbed onto his hand with surprising strength. “Be careful, Keo. God, please be careful. I don’t want to be in here by myself.”

“I’ll be back before you know it.”

She let go of his hand and leaned back against the toilet seat, closing her eyes. He watched her for a moment and saw the barely noticeable rise and fall of her chest. If it weren’t for the fact she was only wearing her bra, he might not have been able to detect that she was still breathing at all.

She’ll never survive the night.

Gotta get her to a hospital…

He moved with urgency to the door and put one hand on the doorknob. He leaned forward and listened, slowing down his breathing so he could focus completely on the other side of the door. There was nothing to listen to. No movement that he could detect, no sounds that he could hear.

Did it leave? Am I that lucky?

He waited another minute.

Then another…

There was nothing. Just a big fat nothing.

Daebak. Maybe I am that lucky. Maybe it really did leave…and took all of its friends with it, too.

You willing to bet your life on it?

One minute became two…

…then two became five…

Keo looked back at Delia. Her eyes were still closed and the bright lights reflected off her wet face, as if she were asleep under water. Her skin looked paler than before. If he didn’t know any better he would assume she was dead, but her chest still rose and fell. Barely.

Keo turned back to the door.

He took a breath, then pinched the lock and twisted it silently in case someone
(something)
was listening in on the other side. He gripped the doorknob tighter and readied the three-foot steel rod in his other hand. It would have been nice if he had a gun instead of a lousy metal rod. Then again, since he was already daydreaming, why settle for any gun? Why not go all out and daydream about an MP5K?

Another breath. Deeper this time.

This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.

He twisted the doorknob and jerked the door open, stepping outside all in one smooth motion. He was raising his makeshift weapon to swing before he had even completely cleared the doorframe.

Darkness and silence, except for his own heartbeat hammering in his chest.

There was nothing in the room. The creature was gone, leaving behind broken glass and splatters of black blood along the wall, mattress, and carpeting. Even in the semidarkness, the blood looked unnaturally lumpy.

He twisted the lock on the other side of the doorknob, then giving Delia’s (impossibly) still form a final look, closed the door back up and didn’t take his hand away until he heard the soft but solid
click
as the latch slid into place inside the strike plate.

Keo moved through the room, careful to walk around the bloodied glass shards on the floor. Besides wearing only boxers, he was also barefoot. The possibility of bleeding to death out here from a glass cut made him slightly queasy.

There was just enough moonlight spilling through the broken window to light his path around the debris. He walked past the bed and remnants of the lamp. The front door was still closed, the chain lock in place, which meant the undead thing had left the same way it had come in.

Keo stopped at the window, flattening his body against the wall. The motel wallpaper was cold against his bare back, and he longed for clothes. That would have to wait, though. He peered out into the world outside, saw the concrete sidewalk, then the parking lot beyond that. There had only been a dozen or so vehicles when he first arrived last night. They were still out there, including his Ford sedan rental, sitting under large bright pools of light from the lampposts.

There was light, and silence, and no movement.

Where is everyone?

He remembered the screams and gunshots from earlier. There were others at the motel. Hell, they were probably looking out their windows right now wondering where everyone was, just like him. Right?

Maybe…

Keo tiptoed to the other side of the bed where his clothes were still in a pile. He put the rod down within easy reach, then pulled on his pants and T-shirt. He had to look for the socks, finding them under the bed. He then grabbed his sneakers and shoved them on, all the while keeping his eyes on the window, expecting the creature to return at any moment.

“Psych!”
it would say.
“Fooled ya!”

But it didn’t return. Like the last few minutes, the only sound Keo could hear was his own breathing. Was he breathing a little harder than usual? Impossible. This wasn’t even close to being the first life and death situation he had been in.

Keep telling yourself that, pal.

He opened the nightstand drawer, pocketed his wallet and car keys, and grabbed his watch. He thought about picking up the Bible and seeing if it said anything about unkillable black-eyed creatures from the pits of hell, but decided he probably didn’t have that much time to waste. Besides, the last time he actually read the Bible was…well, it had been a while.

He was putting on his watch when he heard it.

Car engines!

Keo snatched up the rod and jumped on the bed to get to the other side quicker. He was almost at the window when he saw not one, but two trucks blasting up the highway, their headlights slicing through the darkness. He glimpsed figures in the front and more clinging to the backs of both trucks.

Seconds after the trucks appeared, the darkness around the motel parking lot came alive. They had been there this entire time, he realized, hiding
(waiting)
in the shadows, avoiding the lamppost lights.

He was prepared to see one or two of the same hairless black-skinned things that had attacked Delia and him, but not five—no, ten—
maybe two dozen
of the creatures emerging out of the blackness along the corners of the lot and from the motel rooms around him. Three dark figures flashed by the window inches from his face in a blur of black skin and
clacking
bones. He hadn’t heard doors opening, so he assumed they had used the windows to exit those rooms.

They moved with preternatural speed, with an almost effortless motion that seemed incongruent with their malformed shapes. They bounded across the asphalt parking lot, slipping in and out of the pools of light in pursuit of the vehicles, like rabid dogs chasing something they didn’t have a chance in hell of catching—

The
pop-pop-pop
of gunfire exploded across the night sky, coming from the direction where the trucks had gone. More than one weapon firing simultaneously, judging by the constant rate of fire.

Had they actually caught up to the trucks? They were fast, but he had a hard time believing they were that fast. Likely, there were other creatures already out there that had intercepted the trucks farther up the road. Of course, that introduced a whole new breed of problems, like there being more of the creatures than just the ones at the motel.