Sleepwalkers
by Edward Newton
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Hannah surveyed the car stuck in a snowbank higher than her head, hugged herself against the wind and took measure of the drift. Hannah had survived enough northern blizzards to know when to wave the white flag. The triple threat of cold, wind, and darkness had set upon them, and they had no choice but to wait it out. Hannah climbed back into the small Kia and rubbed her hands in front of the heater, expelling air.
“Will it help if I push?” Will asked.
“Only if you have a football team stashed in the back,” Hannah said grimly. “We aren’t going to dig out on our own.”
Will looked afraid. The sun had set a short time before, and they faced the long winter night together in the car. Hannah checked the gauge—they had enough fuel to keep the engine running until sunrise. They would have to make sure the snow didn’t bury the tailpipe—she had survived too much already to die by asphyxiation. Will hadn’t saved her ass only to end up suffocating in a stuck car.
“Tired?” Hannah asked.
Will shook his head adamantly.
“Can you stay up all night?”
He nodded.
“Then we wait it out ’til daybreak,” Hannah said. “First light, we try for the nearest town or maybe a farmstead. Someone might pull us out.”
Will nodded. He couldn’t look Hannah in the eye, not after what she’d done. He’d saved her from the rest, but that didn’t mean he forgave her for what she did. Forgiveness was a concept that had largely died out after the First Night. Everything had been different after that.
She looked at her fingers. The dark residue marked under her nails wouldn’t scrub out. They’d stopped at a gas station a few miles back before the snow started in earnest, and she’d scoured her fingertips madly, trying to get the last traces of blood out from underneath. After ten minutes of rubbing them raw, the shadow of evidence remained caught in the crevices. She couldn’t erase what happened. Will’s furtive gazes reminded her of her sins.
She had only nodded off for a second, and it had changed their whole world.
“How cold is it out there?” Will asked.
“Too cold for anyone to happen along,” Hannah said.
Her brother wasn’t worried about how long they could survive outside, and he didn’t worry about anyone else wandering around the area. The wind chill would dip to minus fifty overnight, too frigid for anyone. They had nothing to worry about from danger on the other side of the Kia’s body. The scariest thing was inside the car.
Will was more afraid of his sister than he was of the cold outside.
“Remember what it was like before?” Will asked.
He was only ten, and the world had changed before he was old enough to remember. Hannah had been eleven years old on the First Night. They lost Mom during the initial confusion. Mom roused from an early evening nap, but not before she managed to do irreparable harm. Hannah’s brother Eric had to wear an eye patch up to the moment he died—just three short days ago. Eric swore Mom swallowed his eyeball whole before Dad blew her head off with a 10-gauge shotgun.
“I miss dreaming,” Hannah said. “We don’t dream anymore.”
“That means no nightmares, either,” Will said. “Donna said she hated nightmares.”
Hannah nodded. “Sometimes, she would wake up screaming in the night, hollering to beat Hell.”
“Not now,” he said, meaning more than the aftermath of the First Night. “At least there’s that.”
“Every waking hour is a nightmare now,” Hannah said. “There’s no waking up.”
“We’re awake,” Will refuted. “We both know this would be different if one of us were asleep.”
Hannah thought about home. The Longfellow family had survived the last eight years by following strict rules. Their rural homestead insulated them from most passersby. They didn’t let strangers near the house. Dad had put up security measures all around the perimeter of their farm. Eric had watched a plethora of zombie movies before the First Night. While slow-moving undead shufflers would be preferable to how the world actually ended, many of those horror-movie lessons turned out to be helpful in a generic apocalypse.
Eight years, and it all went wrong because Hannah Longfellow wanted a normal life.
“You want some music?” Will asked. “Keep the blood pumping?”
He didn’t meet her gaze—couldn’t—but he watched her out of the corner of his eye, searching for signs of a yawn or a hint of heavy lids. Hannah felt awake and alert. She might not feel so energetic as the night wore on, but she was fine thus far.
Will turned up the volume and headbanged, pounding his fist against the roof to the beat. They sang along to the lyrics they knew, an hour closer to dawn when Will finally turned down the music. He exhaled, not out of exhaustion but rather a particular melancholy fear. He scraped the window, opaque with hoarfrost. Outside, endless white. If anything hungry was wandering around in the night, it wouldn’t last long in the subzero wind.
“You think they’re looking for us?” Will asked.
Elle had survived. Kyle. Maybe Sarah, if she didn’t succumb to her injuries after Hannah and Will left. Would they come after Hannah? Would they brave the dangers of the world to exact vengeance? Or would they bury the dead, mourn the victims, and move on, content that they had survived the slaughter?
“I don’t think so.”
“Dad would have forgiven you,” Will said.
“I’m not sure he could have.”
“I’m sorry that I can’t, Hannah.”
“I understand, kiddo,” Hannah said, tears slipping from her eyes. “I’m sorry, too.”
The wind howled outside, a mournful cry of a world in crisis. Hannah didn’t even know how many people survived across the planet—occasionally, Dad had raised someone on the shortwave radio and gotten updates. Most news traveled slowly, person to person, after the First Night changed everything. Most accounts suggested the population had diminished significantly over the last eight years.
Murdered.
The Longfellows had beaten the odds for a long time. There had been twelve of them on the First Night. Mom had died first, and no one else joined her for the longest time. Then Hannah wanted to be an ordinary nineteen-year-old woman. Three days ago, she snuck over to the Horton farm—the next inhabited place down the road. She had been talking to Bobby Horton over an old walkie-talkie that Eric had forgotten about. Hannah was in love. She stayed up all night long with Bobby. She snuck back into the Longfellow home, so tired. Hannah couldn’t let on that she hadn’t been locked in her room all night like the rest of her family. She fought to stay awake all day. Then, while everyone was reading by candlelight in the family room, her eyelids grew heavy as the sun dipped down.
So heavy.
She fell asleep.
Hannah didn’t dream. She didn’t snore. She did sleepwalk. Her sister Donna was nearest, and Hannah snapped her neck like Dad slaughtering a chicken. Kyle put up his hands to defend himself, and Hannah bit off the ends of all the fingers on his left hand. Much of the blood stuck under her fingernails came from her brother as she clawed off his face. Stronger and faster than any awake human being, some biological change preternaturally adrenalized the sleepwalkers. Eric and Kyle had piled on her, trying to tackle and hold her down. She broke Kyle’s arm and snapped six ribs. Hannah shoved her fist into Eric’s belly, reached up into his chest cavity, and probed until her hand reached his beating heart. She squished the muscular organ in her left fist. Dad had been checking the perimeter, and Will had run off to find him.
Hannah hunted the others. Penny cowered in her closet. Hannah had chewed through her neck until she bit into a carotid artery. Rick attacked as she crept toward Elle, who was cowering under the kitchen table. Rick stabbed Hannah through the thigh with a steak knife. She pulled out the blade and stabbed her brother thirty-six times. Sarah attempted to stop her by bashing her skull with a heavy stone cutting board while Hannah hacked at her brother, but the superstrong sleepwalking Hannah took the blow without significant damage. She picked up Sarah by the throat and threw her across the kitchen, where she smacked the far wall like a fly hitting the windshield of a speeding car.
Will returned with Dad, and their father rushed Hannah like a linebacker sacking the quarterback. He hit Hannah low, lifting her off her feet as she scratched and bit him. His momentum carried him across the kitchen to an open door adjacent to the refrigerator. He shouted at Elle to close the door behind him and lock it. Elle scrambled forward, staring at the scene inside the bedroom, screaming in horror at what she saw. As Hannah turned her attention from her shredded father to the caterwaul of her sister, Elle slammed the door shut and locked Hannah and their dying father inside.
Nightmares? Yes, there were still nightmares.
Hannah had woken the next morning. Locked in a room with windows barricaded, doors locked against even an uncannily strong sleepwalker, with her father scattered around the room in dozens of bits and pieces. Hannah last remembered sitting in the family room, reading Pride and Prejudice, thinking about Bobby Horton and her new romance with the boy next door, feeling sleepy, soooo sleepy. Now—horror.
She threw her head back and screamed for hours.
She had murdered six members of her family.
Sarah was gravely injured, with internal injuries from when Hannah tossed her across the kitchen. The death toll from Hannah’s killing spree might be one more before long. Kyle decreed that they needed to execute their sister. Elle agreed. Will wanted them to spare her life. Kyle and Elle overruled his wishes.
When Kyle and Elle were checking on Sarah, Will released Hannah. They escaped in the Kia. They stopped at safehouses for the night and moved on at daybreak. North, where fewer and fewer survivors endured. Most of the population who had made it through the last eight years lived in warmer climates where people didn’t have to face both the weather and each other.
Now, they found themselves stuck in a snowbank overnight.
The glowing readout on the dashboard clock showed 3:48. The LED numbers grew blurry and began to resemble letters, changing from PENNY to DONNA to RICK to DAD. Outside, the fierce winds moaned a merciless, mournful cry for the mounting dead. The black dog stalked at the edge of Hannah’s vision. Her head felt heavier, her eyelids like lead, as the specter of sleep haunted her. Each minute felt like an hour.
“Hannah,” Will mumbled, the word slurring into Hmma.
She turned her head with an effort akin to lifting the car physically out of the snowbank and carrying it back onto the road. Her brother’s head nodded precariously, his eyes rolling in his head at the verge of unconsciousness. Exhaustion pulled him toward the deep abyss of slumber. His breathing had become shallow, and sleep had him in its rockabye grasp.
“No,” Hannah shouted, slapping Will hard across the face, the sound like a gunshot in the tight quarters of the Kia.
His eyes flew open, his head up, the pink print of Hannah’s hand stark against the pale flesh of his cold cheek. Will stared at his sister with a hollow gaze. Dark circles ringed his deep sockets like a rabid raccoon. He was only ten but looked more like an elderly man. She noted the signs of pure exhaustion. The grief and guilt of saving Hannah after she’d slaughtered their father and siblings had taken too tremendous a toll. She considered every trick for keeping someone awake a little longer—introducing pain, cold, shock. There weren’t enough options inside the confines of the stranded vehicle. With hours before dawn, Hannah realized she could not keep Will awake that long.
“Eyeztayaway azlaken,” Will said. I’ll stay awake as long as I can. “Run.”
Hannah didn’t hesitate. Her alternatives might lead her to a dark place if she considered them. Exposure to the elements would lead to almost certain death. But her fate inside the car, as soon as Will nodded off, was far worse than slowly succumbing to the numbness of subzero temperatures. And the only other choice was to kill Will before he fell asleep.
The wind cut through her like a thousand tiny needles. The blizzard whipped the dry snow against her exposed flesh like the lashes of miniature whips. She squinted against the sting of furious flakes, following the highway as it disappeared for long stretches beneath finger drifts of white. The pulse of the stab wound in her thigh throbbed miserably. Her only chance would be an abandoned farmstead along this rural stretch of road where she could barricade herself against her brother’s attack.
Because he would follow her scent. He would hunt her down. Will would be after her as soon as exhaustion shut down his waking mind and activated a flood of tainted acetylcholine, making him a murderous predator. Hannah’s father had listened for hours at his shortwave radio, parsing through a thousand theories on what happened on the First Night eight years ago… alien experiments activated, solar flares altered human physiology, a virus that attacked the mesopontine tegmentum part of the brain, evolution gone awry, as many possibilities as there were people left to consider the problem. In the end, REM sleep meant the E.N.D. of anyone within killing distance.
You sleep, you kill.
Hannah paused along the breakdown lane of the remote roadway, chancing the use of her flashlight, hopeful Will was still awake and fighting off sleep in the Kia. She spied the remnants of a rotted piece of plywood along the snow-filled ditch, trudged through piles as high as her waist, and cleared off the surface of the weathered plank—Circle Q Ranch. She tottered over a snowbank towering over her head and found an approach on the other side of the ridge between two fenceposts poking only a few inches out of the white, shifting landscape. Between gusts of a blinding blizzard, her trained eye made out a path leading perpendicular to the highway.
A half-hour later, she stumbled numbly up the rickety steps of an old farmhouse. The flashlight beam stabbed through the thick veil of blowing white, revealing a roof canopying the porch, sagging with age and the weight of heavy snowfall. The structure creaked in the whistling wind. The door was locked. The windows were boarded over. No footprints led to or from the property. If anyone lived inside, there was no evidence.
Hannah considered her options. She could pound on the door and hope for help. If someone lived here, they might shoot her dead on the porch rather than take a chance to give her shelter. If someone had locked themselves inside to protect the world while they slept, breaking in might be no safer than waiting for Will to find her in the storm. Or maybe it was empty, locked up by the owners when they abandoned the place sometime in the last eight years. She might have enough time to fortify the entry points if she could get inside.
The worst decision would be facing a feral Will hunting her from the white. She didn’t want to get murdered by her brother.
Hannah knocked. A shotgun blast to the face would be better than Will tearing out her innards as she bled out into the white snow. Hannah would rather end it by an anonymous hand than by someone she loved. If Will killed her and ever found out, the guilt would be worse than if he found her dead on a stranger’s doorstep.
The door opened, secured by a half dozen chains like they used in old hotel rooms, only these links were each as big as Hannah’s hand and clattered like heavy irons. A suspicious eye peered through an inch-wide crack. A mouth with fissured and scabbed lips moved in the shadows, a glint of yellowed enamel illuminated by the flashlight beam.
“What’re you doing out there?”
“Someone fell asleep,” Hannah said. “Killed most of my family.” She didn’t mention that she was the attacker. “I barely escaped.” She left out the part that the survivors of her murder spree wanted to execute her.
“You ain’t a neighbor.”
“No,” Hannah said. “My car got stuck in a snowdrift.”
“You alone?” he asked.
“Yes,” she lied.
The eye narrowed suspiciously. Before the First Night, alarm bells might’ve gone off as the man inside looked her head to toe. This was the horror-movie part where the audience screamed at the coed to stay out of the house. But Hannah knew that whatever was hunting her in the snow was much worse than anything inside the home.
The door closed. The labor of someone undoing a long progression of chains rattled against the steel-insulated panel. Then the door opened, and Hannah quickly stepped inside. The door slammed behind her, deadbolts re-engaged, and chains locked again.
The smell was awful. Death and decay permeated the house, making Hannah gag. A fireplace crackled with warmth, drawing Hannah closer like a moth. Shadows danced in the corners, revealing the rot of thin curtains, moldered furniture, and general deterioration. This place was decomposing before her eyes.
“You live here?” Hannah managed.
“Live,” the stranger repeated, eyes already dead and gone. “Ain’t living.”
He might’ve been twenty or sixty. The lack of sleep and danger of killer kin aged anyone. He would never guess Hannah was only nineteen. She had seen her reflection—deep lines in her temples, crow’s feet thick and purple, premature wrinkles and sallow complexion, hair thinner than her grandmother’s when she passed a few months before the First Night. This was definitely not living.
“Who’s that, Bart?” came a voice from down the hall.
The only way Hannah knew the woman wasn’t an octogenarian was because she was pregnant. She waddled in, cradling her swollen belly. Two toddlers—twins—clutched her skirts. Beside her, a thin boy no older than Will cradled large, round objects the size of bowling balls in each arm. She noted the strain of his thin muscles—they had to be heavy. From each ball, a strong chain led to manacles clasped on the toddler’s ankles.
Anchors. In case they fell asleep.
“A visitor,” Bart said. He had more teeth missing than remained. “She’d die from the cold in another minute.”
In the shadows, an older woman, breathing heavily with a respiratory ailment, stared, her features hidden.
“We don’t need a stranger, son,” the woman said, punctuating every word with a cough. “Trouble.”
“There’s no hope if we can’t help anyone, Ma,” Bart said.
Ma stepped closer. She’d survived horrors. Something had gnawed away her left cheek, teeth marks around shiny scar tissue. The deep furrows of claw marks ravaged the right side of her face. Someone had chewed off an ear. One socket was missing an eye, a cave that ended in darkness somewhere deep in her head. Someone had torn out half her hair, and it had never grown back.
“She can warm up,” Ma said. “Then we put her out.”
The family watched Hannah step farther inside. The pregnant woman pulled her twins closer, the chains jangling from their small manacles. Hannah only wanted to be closer to the fire. She spotted the familiar door leading to a locked room where individuals barricaded themselves while they slept. Several padlocks lined the door. They’d covered the windows in plywood or sheet metal—no way to escape. The hours of sleeping would be incarceration.
Hannah warmed herself by the fire. Soon, they would turn her out. Back to the blizzard. Hopefully, she could delay her exile until daybreak when she might see well enough to keep ahead of Will. By night, he would hunt her down before she could escape.
Hopefully, Will had fought off drowsiness long enough to give her an advant—
Scratchscratchscratch.
Ma whipped her ruined face toward the front door. “What was that?”
Shit, Hannah thought. Oh, shitshitshit.
“Not a knock,” Bart said, taking a tentative step forward.
Ma glared at Hannah. “You were not alone.”
“It’s my brother,” Hannah said. “He gave me a head start.”
Scratchscratchscratch.
“You led him here?” the pregnant woman hissed. “To my family?”
“Family,” Hannah whispered. “You protect them until you need protection from them.”
The pregnant woman’s eyes widened, and Hannah knew she was thinking about her kids. She had anchored her toddler twins with a ball and chain. They would kill her as they slept if they could get their hands on her. The twins would eat their mother’s entrails if she ever turned her back while they were sleepwalking.
“There’s no way in,” Hannah said. “Right?”
“We haven’t had a sleepwalker come here in ages,” Bart said. “Never in a blizzard.”
Scratchscratchscr—
Everyone inside stared at the door. No more scratching. The wind howled a mournful cry. Tiny pellets of snowy ice spattered against the tin covering the windows. The house creaked as the storm shifted the whole structure. Then the roof groaned with the burden of something awful.
Hannah thought about her father telling a Christmas story before the First Night. Santa on the rooftop with the reindeer. The sound of snap-crackle-pop in the fireplace reminded her of the holiday long ago when she had been happy. And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof the prancing and pawing of each little hoof. As I drew in my head, and was turning around, down the chimney—the chimney!
Will landed in the fire, his eyes wide and red with ferocity. His mouth hung open like on a hinge, breathing in a lungful of ash. The flames started his pants cuffs on fire, and his hands blistered in the heat. Orange embers settled in his dirty blond hair, making tiny trails of smoke issue from his head. Will stood on the burning logs in the hearth, scanning the room for victims. Hannah and the family all stared agape, unable to process the sight.
The two toddlers, cowering at their mother’s side, captured Will’s attention first. The pregnant woman stepped forward, protectively tucking the twins behind her. The boy holding the heavy balls retreated as far as the length of the chains allowed. Bart moved himself into position between the woman and children and the homicidal sleepwalker.
The older woman in the shadows bolted toward the nearest saferoom faster than her age and injuries suggested possible. Will tracked the escape trajectory, bolting from the fireplace to intercept the aged prey. Hannah was close enough to intervene, joining in the fight against her brother. Yet she remained still, caught like a deer in headlights as an inevitable collision approached.
Will crossed the room in two loping strides, orange embers like glowing freckles making small points of light in his hair, skin, and clothes. A trail of smoke followed behind him like a comet entering the atmosphere, careening toward imminent impact. He slammed against the old woman like a train annihilating a car stalled on the tracks, knocking her against the wall five feet away from the door to the safe room. Hannah heard the snap of breaking bones. The older woman appeared to have endured a lot of terrible things in her life, but she wouldn’t survive William Longfellow. Will pounced, and he finished the job on her face that someone else had started long before. To her credit, the woman didn’t make a sound as Will dashed her brains across the dusty hardwood floor.
Two doorways exited the living space—one led to a kitchen where the firelight glinted dully off the metal surface of dusty appliances, and the other led down a corridor concealed in shadow. Hannah assumed the hallway led to more bedrooms, which would all be set up with locks and converted to safe rooms. Hannah moved closer to the other end of the living room as Will ripped his victim limb from limb, the sounds of rending flesh like someone pulling apart a raw turkey.
The pregnant woman disappeared into the shadows down the hallway, pushing the tween boy ahead of her, the toddlers shuffling underfoot. Will noticed the escape and turned toward new prey. The blood from his victim had doused most of the glowing embers caught on his skin and clothes, but several still issued smoke from his hair, a flame flickering on the tips of his longest strands down his back. He sprinted toward the woman and children.
Hannah had led Will here. If she hadn’t fallen asleep and murdered half her family, her surviving siblings wouldn’t have sentenced her to execution. Will wouldn’t have had to intervene and facilitate an escape. They would have avoided this doomed fate, forced to flee and stuck in a snowstorm. This whole situation was Hannah’s fault for being careless. She alone shouldered the blame for this situation. She ought to do something to save these innocent people.
“No!” Bart cried.
Bart intercepted Will halfway across the living room, crashing into the supernaturally strong sleepwalker. Hannah watched as the scrawny ten-year-old boy lifted Bart bodily over his head, dropped to his knee, and brought the full-grown man down on his bent leg. Hannah heard the crack when the man’s back broke, and he cried out in a deafening caterwaul.
Hannah took advantage of the distraction and dashed toward the kitchen. Will turned away from the paralyzed man. The hallway presented a more worthwhile prize than the neutralized prey in the living room—Hannah recognized ravenous hunger in her brother’s eyes. He wanted to head off the herd of fresh meat before it escaped.
Bart slapped the metal bracelet of a handcuff around Will’s ankle before he sprinted off toward the remaining members of the family. The other end of the cuff manacled Bart’s wrist. Hannah’s father had carried a pair as well in case someone grew drowsy and needed to be locked down and there wasn’t time to secure them in a safe room.
Bart had given himself to a death sentence.
Will could’ve ripped Bart’s arm off with the proper grip, but Bart pulled his lifeless legs into a fetal position, tucked his head between his shoulders, and balled up to withstand Will’s attacks as long as possible. Hannah watched her brother savage the man, clawing at him like a dog digging for a bone, flesh and blood flying across the room in wet splatters.
Hannah needed to get away. The kitchen proved a dead end, so she dashed for the mouth of the dark corridor. Will noticed her, his wild eyes tracking her sprint across the room. His ankle was still cuffed to Bart, struggling against death to keep Will anchored. Her brother dragged the dying man behind him, leaving a trail of wet mess across the floor as Will slowly advanced.
Hannah’s eyes adjusted to the dark as soon as she plunged into the gloom of the hallway. She saw an open door at the end, the pregnant woman corralling the last twin through the open doorway. The mother stepped into the doorway and looked back at Hannah. Their eyes met through the shadows. Would she give Hannah a chance to survive or lock her out?
The door was a dozen yards away. Every other room was closed and locked—were other family members there? She heard familiar sounds through the panels as she raced down the corridor.
Scratchscratchscratch.
Every room had sleepwalkers locked away. She passed four closed doors, all locked from the outside. They must sleep in shifts to accommodate the number of people inside the house.
Behind Hannah, she heard the sound of a man’s final cry as Will found a way to free himself from Bart’s last attempt to delay the sleepwalker. Hannah raced for the door as the pregnant woman held it open, giving her a chance. The wound in her leg burned and protested, fresh blood trickling down her thigh. Behind her, she could hear the scamper of her brother’s feet. She could picture the long stride of a panther closing in on a kill. A split second would be the difference between Hannah surviving and everyone in the room in front of her dying. A mother would protect her young before letting a sleepwalker infiltrate the saferoom.
Hannah watched the pregnant woman calculate the odds of Will catching Hannah before Hannah slipped through the door. The split-second decision with Hannah’s life hanging in the balance. She couldn’t tell if her brother was within inches of getting her or yards behind her. Hannah could only run faster than she ever had in her life. The door to tomorrow would only stay open for another split second.
Through. The pregnant woman slammed the door behind Hannah. She worked furiously at the locks in tandem with the lean boy, their hands flying through the deadbolts lined top to bottom along the jamb. Will hit the other side of the door hard enough to shake the steel panel in the frame, but they had engaged enough locks to hold. A metal bar braced across the middle.
Scratchscratchscratch.
A sleepwalker was fast and strong but still confined by the limits of human physiology. Will couldn’t claw through the door.
They had to stay awake long enough to outlast Will’s episode of sleepwalking. The average episode lasted as long as a regular night’s sleep—Will could remain in this feral state for another seven hours or more. Once he woke up, he would be her brother again, conscious and left to deal with the ramifications of his actions tonight. He was a murderer now. Just like Hannah. Both Longfellows had been too tired to keep from killing.
“We’ll be okay,” the pregnant woman told the boy and the toddlers. “We’re safe in here.”
Her voice indicated something different.
Hannah thought about the four locked doors. They slept in shifts. That meant that these four were on another shift. How long had it been since they slept? Hannah studied the pregnant woman. She had the fortitude to stay awake to keep the children safe, but what about the boy? Or the twins? The toddlers were cuffed to a ball and chain, but was the room big enough to anchor them away from everyone else? Were the anchors sufficiently heavy to stop the twins from moving around the room?
Had Hannah locked herself inside a room with a bunch of drowsy strangers?
Was it more dangerous inside, or would she have been better off letting Will rend her limb from limb, getting it over with? How long would it take for two toddlers to gnaw off her arm or tear off her face? Should they take preemptive action and ensure the toddlers or the boy didn’t turn? What was Hannah willing to do to survive? The pregnant woman had the baby in her belly to think about. What would the adults have to do to keep on living?
Hannah stared at the others, watching for heavy lids or nodding heads. The nightmare continued, and there was no way out of this bad dream. Hannah was already wide awake.
You sleep, you kill.
“Mama,” one of the toddlers muttered, a colossal yawn pausing the sentiment, tiny knuckles rubbing the corners of his eyes.
The slurred syllables made Hannah’s blood go cold.
Scratchscratchscratch.
“Mama, I’m sleepy.”
| SPECIAL EXHIBIT 2: Return to “Dysmenorrhea“ | Continue Coming Soon to a Civilization Near You, Gallery Two: Apocalypse Presently and read the next attraction, “Chrysalis“ |