Oasis of the Damned Page 5

  * * *

  Darkness fell. The torches were lit, the outpost readied for another attack, but the desert remained quiet and still, beautiful in its way, really, though it soon became apparent to Richter that those moments before the attack could be just as grueling and menacing as the attack itself.

  Crouched behind the sandbags, they waited. She clutched her rifle and quickly touched the hatchet she’d found earlier and hung from her belt. Owens watched the night like a hawk eyeing prey. Already a veteran of these wars and this insanity, just the same, somewhere below his stoic expression lurked a barely contained terror.

  “Where are they?” Richter finally asked.

  “They’re here.”

  Her eyes slowly panned the darkness at the edges of the outpost. Nothing.

  “This might seem like a stupid question,” Richter said, “but at any point did you or the others attempt to communicate with these things?”

  “You mean reason with them?” He gave a quick sideways glance. “Lockwood had that idea too. Figured maybe we could reach them somehow if only we could communicate. Maybe we didn’t need to kill each other like this, he said. Maybe there was a way. We both just want to survive, he said. They’re probably as afraid of us as we are of them. We have to try, he said. And one night, he did.”

  A strange odor wafted through the air around them, gone as quickly as it arrived.

  “They killed him right over there,” Owens said, pointing to an area not far from where he’d burned the creature remains earlier. “Ripped his throat out and skinned him alive…ate him while he was still alive. You have any idea the sounds a man makes when that’s happening to him? Ever heard a grown man call out for his mother like a little boy while he’s dying slow, and there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it, not a goddamn thing you can do to help?”

  Richter fended off horrible memories of her own. “Yeah,” she said softly, “I do, actually.”

  Her answer brought his head around, and as their eyes met, each found understanding there, respect. “There’s no reasoning with these things,” he said a moment later, returning his gaze to the night. “They’re not human. All they want to do is kill us. So they need to die.”

  “Maybe they just don’t want us here. Maybe they see us as the aggressors, the invaders. Maybe this land is sacred to them and they see us as the outsiders we are, desecrating their home and—”

  “Owens!”

  As if born of the night itself, the voice had called out from the darkness, small, weak and male, it sounded as if whoever it belonged to was injured and in considerable pain. Through tears, it cried out again. “Owens!”

  A chill scurried up Richter’s back. There was no question the voice was human, speaking English and had called his name, and the grimace on Owens’s face left no doubt that this was not something only she had heard.

  “Owens, please! Help me, Owens!”

  The voice drifted through the night, seeming to come from all around them.

  Owens began to tremble with what appeared to be as much rage as fear, gripping his machine gun tight. “Don’t listen to it,” he whispered.

  “What’s happening?”

  Before he could answer, a man stumbled into view at the very edge of the outpost, his form illuminated by the fire. A man of perhaps thirty, in a tattered white shirt and khaki pants, his torso sprayed with blood, staggered toward them in the distance.

  “Please, Owens, it’s me, it—help me!”

  Tears streamed down Owens’s face, but he was so focused on the man he didn’t seem to notice. “It’s not him,” he said. “They want me to think it’s him but it’s not, it…it’s not Lockwood. It’s a trick, don’t—don’t listen to it.”

  They watched as the form moved closer, its gait awkward and off-balance in the sand, until it had gotten close enough for them to see its face.

  It had no eyes.

  “Owens?” it asked, head pivoting back and forth in search of him.

  “It’s not him,” Owens said again. “It’s not him.”

  “Mommy!” it cried suddenly. “Mommy, help me! God, please! Help me!”

  Owens stood and fired, hitting it in the head and exploding its skull.

  The form vaulted back and landed in the sand.

  By the time Richter had focused on the prone body, it had already changed, returned to its original form. Not one of us, she thought, one of them.

  At the very edge of the outpost, a series of hideous faces emerged from the sand, followed by sets of shoulders and torsos, the creatures coming up and out of the earth itself.

  And once free of it, they broke into their loping run, insanely fast but gangly like a pack of insects, perhaps fifty or more, snarling and charging in a single wall of drooling jaws and razor-sharp talons, their wails ripping the night, living nightmares on the warpath and headed straight for them.

  Mesmerized, Richter watched them, these others, her eyes wide and mouth open. Do they see the same horror when they look at us? she wondered, focused on their snapping jaws.

  Owens leaned into the sandbags, leveled his machine gun and opened fire, screaming above the din with a war cry of his own. The sound and raw savagery of it tore Richter free of her trance, and she quickly hoisted her rifle into position, took aim and began firing into the horde of creatures.

  By the flames of nearby fires, the attackers fell one after another, screeching in pain before collapsing one atop the other to form piles of writhing corpses in the sand. Others vaulted away into the night, silhouettes bounding into darkness, while others still continued their charge, mindlessly surging directly into the onslaught of gunfire.

  Owens threw a grenade, and then another.

  More monsters fell, blown apart in clouds of blood and gore.

  Richter continued to fire, reloading or dropping one weapon in exchange for another as the bodies continued to pile up, the fallen closer and closer to their barricade until only a handful of the creatures remained.

  “Go!” Owens yelled, drawing his swords and climbing over the sandbags to meet them. “Now—go—now!”

  Pulling first the hatchet, and then a pistol from her belt, Richter followed, landing in the sand on the far side of the bags in time to bring the hatchet down into the skull of a creature already lunging at her through the darkness. It sunk into the beast’s head with a sickening wet sound, easily going deep into its skull. As she yanked it free, ribbons of the strange blood flew about, some of it spattering her face. Bringing the revolver round, she shot at the next closest creature, hitting it in the forehead and blowing out the back of its head. She saw it fall away as another creature closed on her, its talons swinging and slashing at her arm before she could move out of the way.

  A searing pain burned along her forearm and up into her elbow as she staggered back in the deep sand. In her peripheral vision, Richter registered seeing Owens battling three or four creatures himself, but then the thing was on her, its jaw wide and drooling as it tried to pull her down to the ground. Swinging an elbow into its face, she managed to spin free, stumble back against the sandbags, then fire the revolver again.

  She missed.

  The creature landed against her, so close she could feel thick, hot drool dripping against her face. Using all her might, she brought the hatchet up into the thing’s throat.

  The force of the blow cocked its head back and gave her just enough separation to bring a foot up, place it against the thing’s midsection and kick it back.

  Moving after it quickly, she jammed the revolver against its temple and pulled the trigger.

  Suddenly, just as it had begun, the onslaught stopped. She looked to Owens. He was covered in blood, and his swords dripped with gore. Only once before had Richter seen a human being look so utterly lost and devastated.

  An almost unbelievable number of dead bodies lay scattered across the sand. But Richter and Owens both knew there were even more out there. A lot more…

  “Your arm,” Owens said, mot
ioning to it.

  She glanced down at it. Bright red blood was already seeping through a row of linear slashes in her flesh. The creature’s talon had done some damage, but the wound could’ve been much worse, she’d been lucky.

  “Did it bite you?” he asked.

  “No,” Richter said, “slashed me.”

  He nodded, apparently satisfied. “You’ll be all right then, doesn’t look too deep.”

  She looked out into the night. For far as the bonfires allowed her to see, there were bodies and pieces of creatures. “Realistically, how many more of these things could there be?”

  “No idea,” he muttered. “But I’m pretty sure realistically has nothing to do with it.”

  “Where are the rest that attacked?”

  Owens grabbed a torch, set it to gasoline he’d poured on the ground earlier, and a wall of fire was born. “Not far,” he finally answered.

  “I didn’t think they’d stop,” she confessed. “I thought this time they’d keep coming until they overran us.”

  “They’re going to come from both directions now, try to surround us again.”

  Something brushed Richter’s ankle. She jumped back and saw a creature writhing in the sand at her feet. Its legs were on the far side of the fire, but its torso was on their side. Richter squared her stance, raised the hatchet, then brought it down into its head. Once…twice…three times…

  Owens caught her wrist. “It’s dead.”

  She pulled free of his grip, slammed it into the soupy pulp where the creature’s head had once resided, then wiped the hatchet on her pants and staggered back a few steps, chest heaving. “I can’t—we—I can’t stay here. We can’t stay here. We have to get out, we—”

  Something screamed in the distance.

  “They’re coming.” Owens climbed back over the sandbags. “We need to get inside and ride out the night.”

  “If we’re going to stand and fight, then goddamn it—”

  “We’ve done all the fighting we can tonight. If we try to hold them off again, they will overrun us. Look.” He pointed to the night, then disappeared into the darkness of the tower stairs.

  “My God,” she whispered, slowly backing away.

  Through the flames, Richter saw the next wave of creatures closing on the outpost in impossible numbers.

  And encircling it from the every direction, there came even more.

  7

  In the candlelight of the tower room, Owens and Richter sat and waited; weapons at the ready as they listened to the onslaught. The creatures threw their bodies against the door below and did their best to get in, but like the nights before, it held. All around them were the sounds of talons scratching the outside of the tower. Creatures attempted to jump and climb it, but couldn’t hold on long enough to reach the pinnacle, and continually slid back down to the sand with a scraping sound that went through Richter like a knife. And the screams, the horrible shrieks continued, on and on for hours as the night slowly passed.

  “How can they do the things they do but they can’t get in here?” she asked at one point. It was the first time either had spoken in hours. “Why don’t they just shift into some sort of creature that can crawl this tower, or—or—fly up here?”

  He sat nearby, a machine gun in his lap.

  “Owens,” she said; her voice insignificant and detached amidst the clamor.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they can’t.”

  “Or maybe they’d rather drive us crazy…slowly…”

  “Either way, they don’t mind sacrificing themselves to do it. I’m not inside their heads, and I don’t want to be.”

  “We have to get out of here. It’s only a matter of time before they get in. You have to know that, you have to understand that after everything you’ve been through and seen out here.”

  “You gonna keep at this? Where you think we’re gonna go?”

  She leaned closer to him, holding his weary gaze. “If we stay here and keep trying to defend this place, we’ll die.”

  “We’re gonna die anyway.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No, fuck that.”

  “How many times do you expect me to talk about this? There’s nowhere to go.”

  “That’s bullshit. They want this outpost, let them have it. They’re restricted to this area, you said so yourself. They haunt this outpost, this patch of land, not the entire desert.” Something slammed against the side of the tower, startling them both. After a moment when it became evident there was no immediate threat from whatever it was, she said, “So we leave. We leave this god-awful place and give it back to them. And they leave us alone. We’re on their land, and they want us off. So we go. We give them what they want.”

  “What they want is us dead.”

  “Because we’re here,” she insisted. “If we leave—”

  “And go where?” He grabbed a rag and wiped his head and neck. “Look,” he sighed, “the only way we could cover any ground and have a chance at all is if we did it at night, when it’s cool.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Do you understand that’s not an option, how you doing with that part?”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Maybe it isn’t. You think we can outrun those things? And how the hell do we know they’ll stop once we get beyond the outpost? If they decide to hunt us down, there won’t be anything we can do to stop them. I’m not going out like that.”

  “You’d rather die here like a trapped rat?”

  “I’d rather die fighting, defending—”

  “Defending what, this place, this sandbox in the middle of nowhere? We’re not defending anything, Owens. We’re in the middle of a meaningless meat grinder, fighting for our lives. There’s a difference.”

  He looked at her knowingly, and didn’t have to say she was right. His face said it for him. And in that strange moment, Richter would’ve sworn she’d looked into those wounded eyes once before and seen much the same thing.

  Dismissing it, she sat back and tried to concentrate on her plan. If only the creatures would stop the assault, if only the constant din would stop so she could hear herself think. “Tell me, which one of the wrecks is farther away, yours or mine?”

  “Mine. Why?”

  “You weren’t attacked at the site, only once you came here, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Then right before sundown, we go to the wreck and we hide there,” she explained. “It’ll be safe, outside their reach. Once night falls, we go. It’ll be cooler and we’ll cover a lot of ground before sunrise. By then we’ll be long gone from this place.”

  “We could only carry enough water for a couple days,” he said evenly. “We’d have no shelter, limited food and water and could only move at night. We won’t last three days.”

  “Unless someone sees us, or we run into—”

  “It’s not gonna happen, Richter. At least here we can survive.”

  “Not for long. We stay here, we die. It’s that simple. Sooner or later they’re going to breach this tower. Once that happens, we’re dead. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “You said yourself no one’s coming here to save us.”

  “No one’s coming to save us out there either.”

  Richter softened a bit and tried to ignore the continual screeching outside. “If we did make it out of here, where would you go?”

  “First bar I could find so I can drink myself into oblivion.”

  “And after that?”

  Owens shrugged. “Anywhere but here.”

  “You got anyone back in Pennsylvania waiting for you?”

  He thought about it a long time before he answered. “Once upon a time, I was married—two kids, nice house, good job, picket fence, puppy dogs—the whole deal.” Scratching at the stubble along his chin, he looked away, the flickering candlelight barely reaching him now. “I came home from my first tour and my wife told me she wasn’t in love with me anymore. She
was in love with someone else. Just like that. Welcome home, huh? Thanks for your service.” A quick, ironic, joyless burst of laughter escaped him. “She needed to be happy, see, and that just wasn’t possible with me. So that was that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Richter said softly.

  He continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “Before long, she was living in our house with her new boyfriend and our kids, and there was no place for me. I didn’t fit anymore, and of course she took every opportunity to remind me that my presence in her or our daughters’ lives was only confusing things and making it all worse and harder on everyone. Guess I believed her. The girls were still little then, so maybe she was right. Who knows? I went back in, did two more tours. When it was over and I was home, nothing had changed, except our divorce was finalized. Truth is I never expected to come back. Figured I’d die out there, and maybe it’d be just as well. But then, when it’s right there staring you in the face, covered in blood and tears and screams, you realize just how much you want to live. Don’t even know why, really, you just do. Maybe because however bad it might be here, it’s the devil we know, right? Who can say for sure what’s on the other side? Look around, anything’s possible now.”

  Richter nodded but said nothing. She knew exactly what he meant, and in that surreal and frightening moment, felt closer to him than she had before.

  One bloodied hand reaching limply for another…

  “Anyway,” he continued, “started looking for international work, wanted to get as far away as I could. Wound up here on the other side of the world and never looked back.”

  “Until now?” she asked.

  “Maybe, I—I don’t know. What’s your point, Richter?”

  “Have you seen or spoken to your daughters?”

  “Not in years.” He bowed his head. “But there isn’t a day goes by I don’t think about them. I wonder…I wonder sometimes if they ever think about me.”