The Walls of Lemuria (3 page)

Keo shivered slightly at the thought and wished he knew for certain. But that was beyond his control at the moment, and all he could do was stand in the darkness and listen to the chaos. It went on for a while, but inevitably the gunfire began to slowly fade as the action continued on without him.

Eventually he couldn’t hear the gunshots anymore. He wondered if the people in the trucks had successfully eluded the pursuit. Or maybe they were all in a ditch somewhere along the highway at the moment, possibly dead. Or worse. Maybe like…

Delia.

Keo stepped away from the window and hurried across the motel room one more time. He picked up Delia’s clothes—a too-small miniskirt and red top—and headed back to the bathroom.

He knocked on the door as softly as he could, just loud enough for her to (hopefully) hear, and whispered, “Delia, it’s me.”

He waited for a response.

After about five seconds, he tried again, knocking and whispering a bit louder this time. “Delia, it’s Keo.”

He waited five more seconds, then ten…

“Delia?” Slightly louder again. “Delia, it’s Keo. Open the door.”

Ten seconds became fifteen, then twenty…

Keo looked back at the window, at the parking lot outside, trying to guess how much noise he could make without attracting attention from whatever was still lingering around out there or in the surrounding rooms. It was so quiet
(so goddamn quiet)
that any little sound would travel. He could even hear the
buzzing
from the lampposts, something he had never noticed before in all the years he’d spent in motel rooms like this one.

He knocked on the bathroom door again.

Too loud. Way too loud. Anyone with ears would have heard that.

“Delia, open the door.”

Sixty seconds…

He tried the doorknob, but it wouldn’t move. He put his shoulder against the door and gave it a push, but he had no leverage without a running start. Keo was just a shade over 180 pounds of lean muscle, so breaking down the door wasn’t the problem. The racket that would result, though, would be.

He tried again, even louder than the previous times. “Delia, it’s Keo. Delia? Can you hear me?”

She was either dead or dying in there. That was the only explanation. She had looked terrible when he last saw her. If she had succumbed to her wounds, there was nothing he could do. But if she was still alive and needed help…

Dammit.

He stepped back and dropped her clothes to the floor. He gripped the steel rod in one hand and zeroed in on the doorknob and the area around it. Keo took a breath, then delivered a solid kick with his tennis shoe that caved the doorknob in with one blow.

The door swung open and Keo lunged inside.

She wasn’t at the toilet anymore. Delia had somehow crawled into the bathtub, where she now lay curled in a fetal position. Bloody handprints covered the smooth porcelain sides, and the towel that was supposed to be wrapped tightly around her arm was instead in her lap. She looked unconscious and her face, covered in the familiar thick film of sweat, seemed drained entirely of color.

Keo did his best to close the bathroom door back up, but the strike plate was damaged and the doorknob hung off one end. He managed to close it anyway but didn’t delude himself into thinking it would hold if the creature—or God help him,
creatures—
came. If he was lucky, they had already fled after the trucks and there were none left to hear him break down the door.

If
he was lucky.

He waited against the door, listening for the sound of running feet. If they were coming, they were taking their damn time.

After a few minutes, he abandoned the door and rushed over to the tub and leaned over Delia. He already knew what he was going to find even as he reached for her neck. Her face told him everything, and the lack of a pulse confirmed it.

He sat on the tub and stared at her for a moment. Even in death, she was striking. Her eyes were closed and she looked peaceful, as if she had simply gone to sleep. He picked up the shower curtain and placed it over her face and body, then sat for a moment and contemplated his next move.

He looked back at the door.

What was that saying about the world coming to an end with a whimper? There wasn’t even that much at the moment. He would have settled for a little whimpering, anything but the oppressing stillness and silence from the dark motel room beyond the open door.

What the hell is happening out there?

The bathroom light
flickered off around four in the morning and didn’t come back on again. When Keo poked his head out the bathroom door, he wasn’t surprised to see the same darkness in the parking lot beyond the broken window. It was the first clear indication that this was a much wider problem than just something to do with a skeevy motel at the edge of nowhere.

Great. So I guess I’m not the only one SOL.

Of course, knowing that didn’t really improve his lot any. He was still stuck in a motel bathroom with no communication with the outside world.

And now the lights were gone.

He spent the next few minutes turning over the few available options he had in his head. The motel room didn’t have a corded phone, and he didn’t have a cell phone on him. The only people who ever needed to get in touch with him was the organization, and he had a beeper for that. When you worked for the kind of people who employed him, you were summoned—you didn’t converse about the job. The problem with that was a beeper received messages, it didn’t send one out.

So what was left?

Delia.

Her cell phone was likely still in her purse outside. He had seen her using it before they left Garrity’s, where she worked, and again during the short ride to the motel. Even if the power grid was down, cell towers had backup batteries, so there was a chance the phone could still be useful.

Keo picked up the steel shower rod from the counter and, keeping low, moved out of the bathroom and toward the dresser nearby. Her purse was exactly where he had last seen it, on top of the dresser next to the TV. It was a small white thing that somehow, like most women’s purses, managed to hold an astounding amount of everything. He picked it up, shuffled in the darkness over to one of the nightstands, and collected his beeper before heading back into the bathroom.

Back inside, he remained near the partially ajar door. He couldn’t lock it anymore (or fully close it, really), but if something was coming at him, he preferred to see it as soon as possible. Without the bathroom lights, the entire motel was one big dark room anyway, whether the bathroom door was closed or not.

Keo turned on his beeper first. It powered on, the LED display blindingly bright. No messages. Disappointing, but not unexpected. The organization only contacted you when they wanted you back at work, and it had been a long shot to think this had something to do with them.

He pocketed the beeper, then dumped the contents of Delia’s purse on the sink counter and rifled through them. He found her iPhone among the lipsticks, tissue paper, gum, a box of mints, and a dozen other things for which he couldn’t figure out their uses.

He powered on the iPhone. Her lock screen background was a duckface selfie of Delia in her waitress uniform. When he slid the icon to unlock the phone, it asked for a password. But Keo didn’t need to know that because the emergency function was still available, as it was on every phone. The problem was the zero bars at the top left corner of the screen. Would the emergency number work without bars? He had no idea, but there was only one way to find out.

Keo pressed the emergency button.

He didn’t have to wait very long for his answer. The phone wouldn’t connect. For some reason, that didn’t surprise him. No bars meant the local cell tower was down. Either his was the only one affected, or all the towers were down everywhere. Not that the answer mattered. Either explanation resulted in the same thing: a big fat nothing when it came to contacting the outside world.

He shoved the phone into his pocket with the beeper. If nothing else, the screen was bright enough that he could use it as a flashlight if he needed one.

Keo glanced down at his watch: 5:16 
a.m.

*

While waiting for
morning, Keo closed his eyes briefly and didn’t open them again until he felt the warmth of the sun through the (mostly) closed bathroom door. The room had brightened up noticeably, and waking up to the natural glow put him at ease, and for a moment—just a moment—he entertained the idea that last night was just one big bad dream.

He glanced down at his watch: 6:02 
a.m.

The heat was building outside, which meant sunrise was very close. Thirty minutes, he guessed, maybe sooner. He hadn’t been in the state long enough to know for certain, but it was November, and down South that usually meant sunrise between six and seven, complemented by a very early nightfall. Yesterday, the sun had set well before six in the evening.

He spent the next few minutes trying to recall the map of the surrounding area in his head. If he knew where everything was, he could better formulate a plan of action. Right now, his priority was figuring out what the hell had happened last night, and that meant gathering information. He needed cell reception for that. The Internet, a news channel, even a working radio station would be a boon at the moment.

Bentley was the closest town that he knew of, and that was only because he had stumbled across it while looking for a place to eat a late lunch yesterday. That was where he had found Garrity’s bar and inside, Delia. Seeing her across the room, with her spectacular figure, long blonde hair, and large brown eyes, he was almost tempted to believe in love at first sight. Or at least lust at first sight. Either/or.

Crunch-crunch.

Keo slowly turned his head toward the back of the bathroom.

Crunch-crunch.

His eyes settled on the bathtub and the crumpled shower curtain spread over it. Underneath the shiny vinyl fabric was Delia.

Dead Delia.

So why was the fabric moving?

Crunch-crunch.

Keo stood up as the shower curtain was pushed aside by a long and frail
(and darkened)
hand. She slowly peered out at him with a pair of black eyes, like tar. Her nose had changed and it was sharper, upturned—and her lips were gone. Soft lips, he recalled. Perfect for kissing.

Delia…

He didn’t believe in love at first sight, but if he did, she would have been the one.

Delia…

She stood up slowly, bones
clacking
against the tub. Her bra had become too big for her shrunken and slightly hunched over figure, and it hung off breasts that no longer existed. Her hips were narrower and the white panties could no longer be held in place, and they slid down impossibly thin legs. It reminded him of a perverse striptease, except here the purpose wasn’t to tantalize, but to disgust.

“Delia?”

She cocked her head to one side and stared at him, strands of blonde hair falling wistfully off a smooth skull, the skin painfully taut and pink. She looked like a newborn, climbing out of some dark womb and now trying to adjust to a new existence.

“Delia, are you in there?”

Her eyes shifted to the rod in his hand before returning to his face. There was an alertness there in the dark pits. Some kind of awareness of him. But as what?

Food, maybe.

“Delia?”

It looked so much like the creature he had fought last night, the one that kept coming even after he had smashed its skull in with a lamp. But this wasn’t the same one. No, this was the waitress from Garrity’s. Was that thing last night also like Delia once upon a time? Had something bitten it, too?

They bite you, you die…and you become this.

Whatever the hell
this
is.

He remembered the screams last night. The gunshots. The men in the trucks being pursued by a horde of the creatures. Were they all like Delia now? Skeletal and blackened, all traces of humanity stripped away?

“Delia, can you hear me?”

Of course she could hear him. There was nothing wrong with her ears that he could see. There was a lot wrong with her mouth and eyes and body, but those ears looked fine. Was she listening, though? Could she even understand him anymore? Those were the real questions.

She stepped out of the tub, one foot at a time. There was a surprising gracefulness to the way she moved despite her painfully brittle appearance or the grinding noises that her joints made with the slightest movements. In the pooling morning light she looked surreal, like something out of a dream.

Or a nightmare.

Keo took a step back toward the door behind him.

“Delia, stop.”

She took another step forward.

“Can you hear me in there? Is that still you? If it is, stop now. Don’t take another—”

She took another step.