Chapter 12
Denise and Jared huddled against each other, hiding in between two parked cars in an underground parking garage a few blocks from the high school. The only light was from a few dim bulbs hanging from the low ceiling, giving the garage a cold, shadowy ambiance. Denise’s jacket was ripped at the shoulder from when a zombie grabbed for her. Jared’s jeans were splattered with blood from when he smashed a zombie over the head with a baseball bat, cracking its skull.
“Oh God, why is this happening?” Denise sobbed, her eyes puffy and red. “It’s the end of the world. We’re never going to make it out.”
“Shhhh,” Jared whispered, his arm around her shoulder. “We’re still alive, aren’t we? They can’t get us down here.”
“We can’t stay here forever.”
“We can stay until help arrives. They have to call the National Guard or something. By tomorrow, everything will be okay.”
“It won’t be okay,” Denise sobbed. “My dad turned into one of those things.” She gripped Jared’s sleeve and cried. Jared rested his head against the hard concrete wall and closed his eyes.
For a few minutes, they sat in silence. The doors were all blocked, and they felt confident that no zombies could get inside. But there wasn’t much to say. They managed to escape the high school purely by chance, but what they witnessed there was best left unspoken.
“Do you hear that?” Jared whispered.
Denise wiped her eyes. “Hear what?”
“Listen.”
From somewhere nearby, there was a low growling sound. Denise tilted her head, and could just barely hear it. It almost sounded like it was coming from every direction.
Her hands started to shake. “Oh God, what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Jared said. He pushed her hands away and slowly got to his feet.
“No, no, please don’t go,” Denise begged.
“I got to check it out. Maybe one of them got in here.”
Denise shook her head and scooted along the floor until she was crouched behind one of the cars, squeezed in between the car and the wall. She nervously put the edge of her sleeve into her mouth and chewed on it.
Jared stood up and looked over the row of cars. Nothing moved in the garage, nothing that he could see. He stepped out from the cars and stood in the aisle, clenching and unclenching his small fists. If one of the zombies did somehow make its way into the garage, Jared had nothing to fight it with. His pulse pounding, he walked down the aisle toward the garage door that led outside. It was closed, and the regular door beside it was still closed as well.
He could hear the growling noise more clearly now. On the ground in front of him was a small circular grate that drained to the sewers. He realized the sound wasn’t coming from inside the garage, it was coming from ...
Suddenly, the floor underneath his feet buckled with a crash, and he flew into the air, landing on his back with a gasp as the wind was knocked from his lungs. The concrete smashed upwards like an erupting volcano rising from the ground, and Jared scrambled backwards as chunks of concrete rained down. A massive shape emerged from the ground like a corpse rising from the grave, but Jared could see that this was no corpse.
He screamed, frantically trying to get to his feet. The monster jumped from the rubble, the remains of its shredded white coat trailing behind it like a ragged tail. One side of its body was grotesquely overgrown, the shoulder and arm massive and misshapen. A shining eyeball emerged from the exposed muscle on the monster’s bicep. Its face, perhaps once human, was sunken into the bulging torso as if being swallowed.
Jared managed to get up and tried to run. Immediately, the creature jutted its massive arm, and the huge bony spikes at the ends of its fingers burst through Jared’s chest. Blood splashed across the cold concrete and Jared quivered, blood gushing from his mouth. The monster shook its arm and Jared sailed through the air, crashing onto the hood of one of the cars. He bounced sickeningly, blood splattering across the windshield, and landed on the ground right where he and Denise had been sitting just moments before.
Denise got up and ran for it, her wailing, terrified scream echoing throughout the small chamber. There was only one other door in the garage, a locked maintenance door that led to a supply room. She ran as fast as she could for the door, the only place she could hide, even though she knew it was locked.
It didn’t matter. The monster reached her in three huge loping steps, and viciously slashed her with its claws. Denise’s screaming abruptly stopped. Her upper torso continued onward and landed with a thump a few feet from the door, while her legs fell to the ground, still twitching. Blood geysered from the severed torso, intestines spilling out.
The creature roared and smashed down on one of the cars, crushing the front end with a gigantic fist. Metal twisted, glass shattered, and oil spilled to the ground beneath the demolished engine. The beast pounded on the wreckage furiously, turning the car into a crumpled head of scrap metal.
The dead girl was not its quarry. Her blood was not the same as its own, it did not contain the same DNA that the monster searched for. It hunched down on all fours and its demonic growl seemed to make the entire garage tremble.
It could have easily smashed through the garage door and escaped out into the open, but something held it back. Somehow, it knew that its prey was not outside. For now, the creature needed to remain hidden, until it could locate its target. It smashed down the door to the maintenance room and squeezed inside, knocking apart the shelves packed with empty gas cans, orange traffic cones, bags of cement mix, and gardening equipment. The supply room split off to another hallway leading to the right, which ended in a narrow stairway heading down.
The beast squeezed its way down the stairs and crept along the dark tunnel at the bottom, its eyes able to see in pitch darkness. The maintenance tunnel led to a connecting series of subterranean hallways beneath the rows of apartment buildings on the surface, running parallel to the sewer tunnels. These rarely used maintenance shafts led to many of the buildings in the surrounding blocks. The floor was coated in a fine layer of dust.
The creature continued onward. Its offspring was still to be found, and every step it took brought it closer to its goal. Deep inside the creature’s body was a growing embryo, destined to be implanted. When it finally found the object of its search, the young female offspring, the embryo would be implanted, and the next phase of its evolution would begin.