The Walls of Lemuria Read online

  The sunlight…

  He could almost sense its growing frenzy. It definitely knew what he was trying to do.

  Keo swung again, and the windshield caved in under the tire iron this time.

  He wasn’t prepared for what he saw next.

  The creature’s skin seemed to boil for a split-instant before it turned white, taking the form of some kind of brittle second skin that actually looked like gray cigarette ash. But even that didn’t last for very long. The ashy substance began flaking against the air, as if coming unglued at the molecular level. It happened almost instantaneously, like watching acid swallow human flesh, stripping it clean off the bones. The sheer speed of it surprised and shocked him, even more so than the reveal of bleach-white bone underneath.

  A very strong acidic odor attacked the air, choking him. Keo instinctively started breathing through his mouth, but he was just a second too late and doubled over and thought he was going to vomit what little he had managed to eat last night. It was a dry heave, though, and he managed to back away from the vehicle with his stomach’s contents intact.

  This is impossible.

  The black-skinned thing wasn’t dying; it was evaporating before his eyes. Its flesh and muscle, anyway. The bones were still there, along with the skull—though it looked grossly deformed—that was rolling around in the floor of the luxury car.

  Keo took another couple of steps back before he felt safe enough to start breathing through his nose again. But the damage was done, and the tainted smell clung to his clothes and hair and skin. He thought about the cheap carry-on he had left behind in the Ford rental back at the motel, and the pair of shirts and pants inside, along with the disposable toothbrush. It would have been nice to have the option of changing clothes right about now…

  He regained his composure and moved back toward the car, then stared into the shattered back windshield at what remained of the creature inside. There wasn’t very much; just a small pile of bones and the skull gleaming in the sunlight, along with remnants of the ash that used to be the thing’s skin and flesh lingering in the air.

  So that’s why they’re scared of the sun. Because it does…that to them.

  That was why the creatures in the motel never left the rooms, or why the one in the manager’s office refused to be goaded into the sunlight. But it wasn’t just the presence of the sun—it was direct exposure to the sun. Direct contact.

  What am I saying? This is crazy.

  Isn’t it?

  Keo tried his best to shake it off. He wouldn’t have believed a single word of it if he hadn’t lived through it last night and this morning. In so many ways, it was similar to his work with the organization. They sent him to places and paid him to do things he could never explain to another human being in any coherent way, unless they had also lived through it with him.

  But this…this was insanity.

  Wasn’t it?

  He had to keep moving. That was the only way to convince himself he wasn’t dreaming, that this wasn’t some bad nightmare he couldn’t wake up from.

  Keo walked back over to the Lancer and climbed inside and drove off, pointing the truck east, back toward the town of Bentley. All he had to do was keep driving, keep moving. Sooner or later, he would run into something that actually made sense again.

  There were answers out there. He just had to find them.

  At least he knew more now than he had last night, or even an hour ago.

  The creatures weren’t stupid, he knew that much. They weren’t geniuses by any stretch, but they were definitely operating on some kind of low-level intelligence. Almost primal instincts. And they couldn’t be killed. He was almost sure of that now. Well, that last part wasn’t entirely true.

  The sun.

  They’re afraid of the sun, and with good reason…

  CHAPTER 5

  The town of Bentley, Louisiana, had a population of just over 3,000. Its only real feature was the flat state highway that ran through it. The road was parallel to the more well-traveled Interstate 20, but if you ended up in Bentley, you were either lost, looking for gas, or a combination of the two. There was nothing else about Bentley that was of note, though last night it had introduced him to Delia at Garrity’s bar.

  Keo was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t completely screwed as he drove the long stretch of road through Bentley. Garrity’s would be a few blocks ahead, but he remembered seeing a police station on the other side of town. Not that Keo expected to find help there, but a law-enforcement building meant weapons, and right now he needed more than just the tire iron lying in the front passenger seat.

  There were a few cars in the streets, parked haphazardly as if their owners had simply stepped on the brakes and abandoned them. There was a blue pickup buried in the side of a Wallbys Pharmacy, and another vehicle had run down a stretch of hurricane fencing and broadsided a red brick building that looked like a bakery, or possibly a diner. The sign that would have told him either way had been knocked free during the crash.

  There were no signs of people on the streets. Bentley was a ghost town.

  He continued through town at ten, sometimes fifteen miles per hour, hoping to spot someone—some thing—that would signal he wasn’t alone before he arrived at the police station.

  Moving slowly was how he noticed there was something wrong with the windows. Something off. It took him a moment to realize they were all being covered from the inside. The ones that didn’t have curtains now had other things hanging over them. A bed sheet, a blanket, even towels. There were a few with walls of furniture, and one actually made use of a stack of boxes.

  Someone—some things—had been busy last night.

  The sun. They’re keeping out the sun.

  Keo stopped the truck in front of a convenience store with sheets over its windows and stared at it for a moment. It would be dark in there. Shadows everywhere. No direct contact with sunlight.

  Because they evaporate on contact with sunlight.

  How is that even possible?

  It only took him five seconds to decide that driving on was the better option. He stuck Delia’s cell phone out of the open window as he drove, but he might as well be holding a bar of soap. He switched to the Android smartphone just to be sure.

  Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Jack shit.

  Maybe he’d have better luck when he hit the interstate—

  The flickering of chrome snapped him back to the present. Keo jerked on the steering wheel just as a truck flew by. Scarring red paint and white stripes flashed in front of his eyes as the vehicle blasted up the road in the other direction.

  Keo climbed out of the Lancer as the other truck kept going. There was a lone figure in the cab, but he couldn’t tell if the man was looking back at him or not.

  “Nice to see you, too, pal.”

  The red truck made a right turn and disappeared into a side street. Gradually, the sound of its engine faded.

  Keo took a moment to look at the town spread out around him. The place felt different from outside the Lancer. It wasn’t just the eerie quiet against the truck’s churning engine, either. There was something else. An almost noticeable shift from life to death, from civilization to…what?

  Good question.

  Keo had never been particularly good at abstract thinking. He was a “see target, shoot target” type of guy. He left the thinking and planning to other people, folks who got paid more than he did.

  “See the world. Kill some people. Make some money.”

  It was a simple mantra (he was a simple guy), and it had been working for him for the last ten years. Of course, that was before last night. Whether he liked it or not, last night had changed everything.

  *

  He spent the next thirty minutes driving through Bentley’s streets, moving back and forth off the main highway with his windows rolled down and the speedometer at no more than twenty miles per hour. He dropped down to ten miles per hour whenever he thought he saw something that, inev
itably, proved to be a false alarm.

  There was nothing and no one out there. Whenever he saw covered windows he kept going, even if he thought he caught glimpses of movement on the other side. He wasn’t sure if they were trying to lure him in, or if they were just restless and reacting to his vehicle. God knew the Lancer was probably the only moving thing in the entire town at the moment.

  He knew one thing for certain, though: The night wasn’t his friend anymore.

  Delia could have told him that. So could the guy (or girl?) in the manager’s office. Or the poor saps who were driving the Lexus.

  The night is theirs. Stay out of the night.

  He kept the radio on as he drove, occasionally spinning the dial through the AM bands, hoping for some snippet of conversation. He had always hated listening to talk radio. Too many people with myopic agendas talking about things they didn’t really understand from the comforts of their couch. Keo had been out there. The world was a vastly complicated—and bloody—place.

  Right now, though, he’d take just about anyone. A sound that wasn’t his own breathing. A voice that wasn’t his own echoing inside his head.

  The fact that the Emergency Broadcast System was still nowhere to be found was the most disturbing part. The EBS was the United States government. Keo couldn’t imagine what kind of force you’d need to take down the U.S. government. And in one night, too. You would need a full-scale and highly coordinated East-to-West coast invasion using millions of soldiers attacking all at once. It was unthinkable and ridiculous.

  Wasn’t it?

  And yet, and yet…

  Where the hell is everyone?

  What the hell happened last night?

  *

  The police station was a single story building with its own parking lot out front and open, undeveloped land in the back. Red-and-black brick walls greeted Keo as he pulled into a handicap parking space and climbed out. There were white-painted burglar bars fastened over the windows and two security gates over the front doors. They all looked intact, and he was relieved to not see anything covering them up on the other side, though one window did have its curtains pulled.

  He was disappointed by the lack of activity around the station, but not terribly surprised.

  There were two squad cars parked near the front, along with a black Ford sedan, a white pickup, and a red Dodge Durango that stood out. The mid-size SUV looked as if it had simply stopped as close to the front doors as it could before being abandoned. Armed with the tire iron, Keo checked the empty SUV through its open driver side window before moving on to the police vehicles. There were no weapons in the front seats and none in the trunk, either.

  Of course not. Why should my luck improve now?

  He kicked something small on the ground when he turned. It clinked away.

  Keo crouched and picked up a spent shell casing. He glanced around and saw more shiny brass spread across the parking lot, glinting under the morning sun. How’d he miss those before?

  He headed into the building, retracing a trail of dried blood that stretched from the parking lot to the front doors. Someone—or someones, judging by the large amount of blood—had been dragged in last night. Glass shards covered the concrete walkway closer to the doors. The security gates up ahead had kept the doors in place, but that hadn’t prevented someone (something) from breaking the glass anyway.

  Keo tried the doorknob on the security gate, but it was locked.

  “Anyone home?”

  He waited for a response.

  Five seconds…ten…

  “Anyone?”

  Five more seconds…ten…

  “I swear I’m not selling anything. Honest.”

  He tried pulling the security gate. It moved a bit, showing obvious wear and tear (from last night?), but it was going to take a lot of effort and sweat—not to mention the right tools—to pry it free from the walls. There were a couple of windows to his right, so Keo moved over to them, stepping on flower beds and skirting bushes along his path.

  The only noise for miles belonged to his footsteps crunching the damp soil and the clang! clang! of a metal latch banging against one of the flagpoles behind him.

  The burglar bars were still in place over the windows, and pulling at them for a couple of minutes only tired out his arms. Keo peered in through the curtainless window. Despite the sun, there were too many patches of shadows on the other side, and he could barely make out a group of desks and chairs. If there were people in there, they would have spotted him easily enough.

  So where were they? The doors were still locked, which meant someone had made it here last night. So why were they hiding—

  The loud boom! of a shotgun blast rocked the town behind him.

  Keo looked back and across the street at a row of storefronts just as a flock of birds perched on a nearby roof took flight in terror.

  A second boom! tore through the air.

  Keo ran across the parking lot as a third and fourth shot rang out less than a second apart. He was on the road when a figure emerged out of a gas station in front of him. There were clothes draped over the building’s windows, along with newspapers and plastic bags. It looked like a makeshift mural of leftovers from an old, dying world.

  The man who was backpedaling out of the store lost his footing when he stepped off the walkway and didn’t account for the slight drop. He fell down to the hard concrete on his butt, but somehow still managed to hold onto the shotgun.

  Keo slowed down as he crossed the gas station parking lot. “That last step’s a doozy.”

  The man scrambled up and spun around at the sound of Keo’s voice, taking aim with the weapon. Keo slid to a stop and instinctively raised his hands as high as they would go, praying he didn’t get shotgunned to death in the next few seconds.

  Right. Crack a dumb joke at a guy with a shotgun. You’re a real dumbass.

  Something behind the man drew Keo’s attention. The store door was slowly closing, and Keo saw two pairs of dark black eyes looking out at him from the shadows. One of the creatures, its black skin almost invisible in the semidarkness, had a hole in its chest and was missing almost its entire left arm, cracked bone sticking out at an impossible angle. The rest of the arm was on the floor in a pool of (moving?) black blood. Then the door closed, blocking Keo’s view.

  The sound of the shotgun racking snapped Keo’s attention back to the man. A pair of intense brown eyes looked out at him from underneath an LSU Tigers cap. The face was hardened—mid-fifties, eyes that had seen their share of bad things even before last night. He wore civilian clothes, jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt, and there was a padded pouch on his left hip, bulging with what Keo guessed were extra shells for the shotgun currently pointed at his head.

  “Put it down, string bean,” the man said. “Put the tire iron down now.”

  Keo slowly bent at the knees (Slowly, don’t get shot) and laid down the tire iron.

  “Step back,” the man said.

  Keo did, raising his hands back up without having to be told. He eyed the man from top to bottom, getting a good feel for who he was dealing with. The man’s voice was hoarse, which matched his grizzled face. He was barrel-chested, maybe five-eight, and African-American. He looked in reasonably decent shape for a man his age. Sunlight reflected off a bald head and the grays were liberally spread out across a five-clock shadow.

  What Keo really noticed, though, were the man’s hands. Despite his recent encounter with the creatures inside the gas station, those hands were rock steady.

  That’s a man who knows how to use a weapon.

  “I was just coming to help,” Keo said. “You a cop?”

  The man cocked his head, then grinned slightly. “How’d you know?”

  “You look like a cop.”

  “Not anymore. Orlando PD.”

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  “Yeah, well, I was on vacation.”

  Keo grinned. “Small world. I was on vacation, too.”

/>   That’s right. Find something in common with the guy pointing a shotgun at you. Maybe then he won’t shoot you dead.

  Keo nodded at the door behind him. “What happened in there?”

  “I was looking for survivors. I found more of those things instead.”

  “There are more of them, you know. In the other buildings with the covered windows. That’s how you know.”

  The man didn’t reply right away. He seemed to be considering what Keo had said. Then, finally, “How’d you know that?”

  “They’re afraid of sunlight.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it seems to be the only thing that can kill them. I saw it for myself on the way over here.”

  “How do you know it’s the only thing that can kill them?”

  “How many shots did you fire at those things inside the gas station?”

  The man grunted. Keo wasn’t sure if he had gotten through, but the guy hadn’t shot him yet, so that was a good sign.

  “I’m not the enemy,” Keo said. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s happening, same as you. I came to the police station looking for help and maybe some answers.”

  And some guns would have been nice, too, he thought, but didn’t say out loud.

  Keo heard footsteps behind him. He looked over his shoulder at a man and a short woman with blonde hair running across the street. He had no idea where they had come from, but he guessed from inside the police station. The man was armed with a shotgun and the woman was clutching a police baton. They slowed down as they reached the gas station parking lot, both out of breath.

  “Norris!” the woman said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay, Rachel,” the man named Norris said. “This guy had some interesting things to say about the creatures.”

  “Does he know what’s happening out there? About last night?”

  “I know as much as anyone,” Keo said. “But if we can all lower our weapons, maybe we can figure this whole thing out. After all, I’m the only guy who’s going to get killed here if people start shooting.”