Still of Night Read online

  — 3 —

  The grounds were overrun with orcs, lurching and moaning as they roamed looking for their prey. Rachael watched with anxiety from a second-floor window, leaning on the sill, forehead pressed against the cool glass. She tried to ignore that each one of the horrible, ruined creatures below her were once humans, each one with their own story. No time for that now. They needed to get to the fence. They needed to block any more of the orcs from getting in, and they needed to clear out the ones that had gotten in already.

  “They’re not ready,” Rachael said, disheartened. “I can’t ask them to fight that many, not yet.” She paused. “I’m not ready to lead them. I let them all down, I trapped them here.”

  Brett stood behind her silently for a few minutes, before setting something down next to her hand.

  “You’re more ready to lead them than you think,” he said as he walked away. She looked down at the Wonder Woman tiara he’d laid there, her fingers wrapping around the metal.

  — 4 —

  Rachael stood on a chair, pieces of metal Wonder Woman armor strapped over layers of clothing and leather, a mismatch of costumes and protective layers. Her eyes traveled across all of the men, women and children watching her silently, one by one, meeting their eyes. She could feel the fear in the air, but she could also feel their hope. Their faith. Their trust in her.

  “You’ve faced every challenge to get this far,” she told them. “No. You’ve defeated every challenge to get this far. You’re not afraid. You’re not weak. You are survivors. Yes, we’re no army. We don’t need to be. You are strong. Every single one of you. You are heroes.”

  She looked from face to face, her fingers clutching the tiara.

  “I won’t ask you to fight if you don’t want to. I won’t make anyone do anything they don’t want to. But know that we fight to protect our home; to protect our family. This is our family. You are my family—and I will fight to defend you.”

  There was silence for a moment, then a rising murmur in the crowd as Alice stood.

  “You fought for us before you knew us. I’ll fight with you.”

  One by one, all of her students stood, followed by more and more people until every single person in the cafeteria was on their feet.

  Pride rose in Rachael’s chest as she looked around.

  “We must move fast before more of the orcs come through. I know we can block the fence and clear out the orcs. Gather anything you have that can be a weapon.”

  As she stepped down from the chair, Maria and two other teenage girls, Eden and Kate, pushed through the crowd gathered around her.

  “We . . . uh . . . we were on the track team,” Maria started shyly, “and . . . um . . . we wanted to volunteer to run to the fence to try to block it.”

  “We’re fast and strong and we can outrun anything that tries to get us,” Eden piped up.

  “We want to help,” Kate added.

  Rachael looked at the three teens with a smile. “If you promise me you’ll be safe, I will gladly accept your help.”

  “It was Maria’s idea, but all three of us were the fastest on our team and we all want to help!” Eden said.

  Maria wouldn’t meet her eyes, and Rachael smiled at her proudly. Holding up the crown, she gently placed it on Maria’s dark hair. The teen looked up in surprise and confusion; then reached up to feel the crown on her head.

  “I’ll make you proud,” Maria whispered.

  “You already have,” Rachael replied.

  — 5 —

  “Do you think you can do it?” Mark asked nervously. “Do you think you’ll survive?” He watched Rachael’s group gathering their weapons, his own hands empty.

  “I think we can,” Rachael said with more confidence than she felt. “You don’t have to worry; we’ll make sure we still have a home come morning. Plenty more plants for you to weed,” she added with a small smile. He didn’t return it. She put it down to nerves.

  Turning away, she moved over to her waiting army. Walking up and down their ranks, she split them into five teams of equal size, making sure each squad had the right balance of muscle, fighting skills, and common sense.

  “We need to clear out the orcs,” she said, “and keep them away from the fence while Maria, Kate, and Eden secure it. They should be able to barricade it temporarily with some of the metal sheeting we have in the yard, but it will take some time. We need to buy them that time.”

  “It’s dark, and we will use that to our advantage. We need to be as quiet as possible, take the orcs out a few at a time so we don’t get swarmed. We’re going with a buddy system, groups of four. Know where your team is at all times. We want to come out with the same number we go in with.”

  Brett headed up one team, while Rachael joined another. Alice, armed with a butcher’s knife from the kitchen, stuck close to Rachael’s side as they made their plans: all the teams would split up, defending and clearing the courtyard from different angles, hoping to spread the horde thin.

  The runners—with Sophia, Maria’s mom, as backup—would sneak to the fence and make the repairs as quietly as possible, hoping that darkness and silence would would give them enough time before more orcs came through. Once the fence was fixed, they would clear out the rest of the orcs a few at a time, and hopefully have them all cleared before morning.

  Rachael gave each of the runners a hug before they left, wishing them luck.

  “May the odds be ever in our favor!” Eden said with a smile, giving Rachael a salute before they moved off into the darkness.

  The odds are never in our favor. The ominous thought struck her, but she hushed it, focusing on sending each team to their starting point, and readying the attack. The runners slipped into the darkness, silent shadows keeping to the fences and weaving undetected between the orcs. Rachael crossed her fingers for luck. Playing at being heroes was one thing, but actually being heroes—being warriors—was something else. The armor and weapons and occasional bits of speech cribbed from a fantasy novel or movie helped support the affectation, but once they were in combat they were going to be ordinary people faking it until they made it as heroes, or until they died. Rachael could not will them to be better fighters, she could not make them remember their training and drills. All she could do was pray, and she was not great at that.

  She said a prayer anyway. In Elven, because . . . fuck it. Why not?

  Then led her own team out to begin their assault.

  Rachael had left the most dangerous approach for her own team: the barricaded front door. Moving with quiet caution, they unbarred the door and she stepped up to peer through the gap. There were more orcs than she had anticipated, and most of them had come close to the hospital, following the sounds and smells of living flesh. Turning to her team, she gave them a brave smile.

  “On three. Ready?” They nodded, and without making a sound, she drew her sword and dagger before silently mouthing the countdown. On three, she kicked the doors wide open and led the charge.

  Immediately out the door they were deep in battle, and Rachael moved with practiced skill as she sliced and stabbed through heads and necks, digging her dagger into the eye socket of an orc and driving her sword through the skull of another.

  Bracing her foot against the second orc to pull the blade out, she turned to watch the rest of her team. They weren’t as skilled or experienced, but all four of them moved with purpose, Alice slashing the head of one orc with her knife while Andy slammed a club into the skull of another, crushing it with an explosion of black decayed brain matter.

  Rachael heard the yells of other teams as more and more orcs began to notice them. She returned to her attacks with renewed determination, focusing only on her strikes and the sound of her breathing. The orcs fell, but where one went down, two more took their place as more and more were drawn to the sound of combat.

  Slice, cut, dodge, stab. Her sword and dagger were a blur as she struggled to make a dent in the sea of monsters. Each time there seemed to be a lull,
more orcs poured into the courtyard. She didn’t have the luxury of checking on her team to see if the screams were sounds of triumph or of one or more of her people dying.

  Then she heard a blood-curdling scream of pain and terror come from the fence.

  Rachael’s stomach dropped, and she lunged past the orc she was fighting, sprinting forward. She didn’t stop to fight, instead dodging under outstretched arms and clawing hands, ignoring the decaying faces. Right now she had one focus in mind—the girls at the fence.

  The darkness near the barricade made it nearly impossible to see, and Rachael nearly tripped over a fallen orc sprawled on the ground. It snatched at her ankles, catching the leather boots with its sharp nails, unable to break the surface. She stomped on it a few times, driving shards of skull into its brain and silencing it forever.

  The screaming had also stopped, though, and Rachael feared the worst.

  Shapes moved by the fence, but Rachael couldn’t tell if they were friend or foe, so she sheathed her sword, keeping only her dagger out, not wanting to attack an ally by mistake. Still, when a small form hurtled into her from the darkness, only the sound of all too human sobs stopped Rachael from lashing out with the dagger.

  “Kate . . . ?”

  The figure nodded.

  “Are you okay? Were you bit?”

  Kate shook her head. “No, but . . . ” She couldn’t finish, her body wracked with sobs.

  “Stay here,” Rachael ordered, and crept forward, counting the bodies along the ground, struggling to see who or what was in front of her.

  Cursing the darkness, she pulled a small flashlight from her belt pouch and, holding her breath, flicked it on.

  Four figures at the fence turned away from their feast, rotted faces in permanent snarls created by flesh ripped away from bone. She swallowed bile as she recognized the orc’s victims: Eden and Maria’s mother. Their prone bodies were torn open, their ripped clothes soaked with blood.

  Rachael lunged forward, thrusting the dagger into the eye of one of the feasting orcs, tore it free and plunged it through the skull of another. She kicked a third into the fence. Pulling up one of the metal stakes providing extra support to the fence, she drove it into the fourth one’s head, before kicking the punctured skull off in time to finish off the remaining one with a power swing into its hideous face.

  The fence behind her shook in a rattle of metal, and Rachael leapt to her feet, ready to fight more hordes of orcs. But instead, she was faced with Maria, the Wonder Woman crown askew on her head. The girl was clearly terrified and covered in blood, but in one unbitten piece. Rachael wanted to hug her, but Maria turned, sliding the last of the fence into place and wrapping the wires tightly.

  “It’s done,” she said, voice both shaky and numb. Rachael recognized that tone; the same one she’d used when she realized her phone was dead and she could no longer contact her family. Not exactly defeat, but close. A weariness of the soul that ran deep.

  “The fence was cut, Rachael,” Maria added flatly. “I looked. It was cut, and big enough for the orcs to get through. I think someone did it on purpose . . . ”

  “Please, I want to go back,” Kate sobbed. Rachael yanked her knife out of the orc’s skull, holding it at the ready as she ran behind the two girls back toward the hospital building. Pushing them toward the door, Rachael returned to the fight, drawing her sword again and slashing with anger through the orcs that stumbled her way.

  This was their home. It was supposed to be their safe place, and her anger drove each strike of the blade as she cut down orcs, littering the ground around her with their fallen bodies.

  They were down to the last tattered remnants of the horde, at least as far as she could see. Only a handful of orcs still shambled and moaned at them, reaching out with bloody hands.

  Alice yelled out to her left, and Rachael turned to see her friend sprawled on the ground, clutching her ankle. Rachael lunged at the orc trying to claw at Alice, slicing its hand off and sending the rotted appendage flying. She swung the sword at faces and arms and legs, sending other orcs stumbling backward against their fellow undead. Rachael kept after them, weaving a protective circle of steel around Alice with the gleaming arcs of her sword and dagger.

  “Keep it going!” she bellowed to her forces, slicing with her sword to keep an orc back. It collapsed as a club smashed into its head. Andy nodded at Rachael before bounding back into the fight.

  Rachael turned and watched as the last of the orcs fell and their teams—their family—gathered back together. She looked around at the grim scene. Most of the squads were down to only one or two members. A quick count told her that at least fifteen of them had fallen.

  Rachael felt numb, her heart sinking. They had trusted her, put their faith in her. Would they think she failed them?

  As if the survivors read her mind, a number of fighters reached out to her, offering a hand of support or a squeeze of solidarity. They didn’t need to say the words; she could hear them even in silence. They had made their choice. They fought for their home, and they would do it again. They fought for each other, and they fought for her.

  A figure stepped toward her out of the gloom. Brett. And then he was there, cradling her face in his hands as he looked into her eyes. He kissed her deeply and she melted into the kiss, her terror and sadness momentarily gone as he hugged her to his chest.

  Rachael wanted to stay there forever, but there was work to be done. Injuries to tend to, wounds to heal. She took a deep breath and pulled away to help Alice to her feet, slinging an arm over her shoulder and guiding her through the door into the darkened lobby of the hospital. Into the home they’d protected at such a great cost.

  A gunshot rang out, the bullet echoed past Rachael as it struck the wall a foot from her shoulder, shattering the tile. She froze, still supporting Alice and unable to get to the sword at her side, eyes darting around for the source of the attack.

  “Well, I guess I’ll need to take care of you myself, since the dead couldn’t handle it.”

  Rachael looked up and around, following the sound of the voice. She recognized it, but not its tone of confidence.

  There. Up on the dimly lit lobby balcony overhead.

  Mark leveled his weapon at Rachael, eyes pools of dark shadows as he stared her down.

  “Mark, put the gun down. Please.” She tried to keep her voice level. Seeing her distress, Brian moved in to support Alice. Rachael stepped forward, putting herself between the gunman and the rest of her people. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw some of her trainees moving along the wall, out of Mark’s eyesight, stealthily creeping towards the side stairwell.

  Keep him distracted, the voice in her mind whispered. Keep him talking.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why are you trying to do this? You can have this as your home, you can be part of something bigger—”

  “I don’t want to be part of your home,” Mark scoffed, shifting his grip on the gun. “You’ve made this a perfectly hospitable place, and we want it for our own.”

  “‘We’?” she prompted, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow, putting on a mask of confidence. Shadows shifted up above, prompting anxious cries from her friends as four men, armed with gleaming knives, appeared along the railing. Rachael swallowed hard.

  “And there’s more where they came from,” Mark added with a smug smirk.

  “There’s more than enough room for all of—” she began, but Mark cut her off, pacing back and forth along the railing.

  “No, there’s not enough room for you,” he snapped, gesturing with the gun. “This place is ours now. Ours. That’s how it is now. You don’t like it? Tough shit. We earned this spot. You couldn’t keep it and that means you don’t deserve to have it. Simple math.” He paused for a moment and shook his head. “I was hoping you’d move out when the fences fell, but you didn’t. Kind of hoped you’d all get bitten. That would have been easy. Well . . . for us, I mean. The rotters chow down on you and then we get rid of them. E
asy peasy. But don’t get me wrong, if I have to just shoot you myself, I will. You can count on that shit.”

  Keeping her eyes on Mark, Rachael clasped her hands behind her back, pointing off to the side away from the stairwell with one hand, hoping that one of her people would understand what she needed. The traitor went on with his tirade. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice what was going on in the shadows behind him.

  “So, what now?” she asked. “There’s a lot of us here, Mark. Do you really want to have that many murders on your conscience?” Please let him focus on me and not turn around, she prayed to anyone or anything that would listen, her fingers wrapping around a small knife tucked in a sheath at the small of her back. Taking one, two, three steps forward, she continued to talk.

  “Fuck,” laughed Mark, “I’m not even sure murder is a crime anymore. Seriously . . . go ahead and call a cop. Oh, wait, you can’t, because they all got eaten. That’s how it is now. It’s a big scary world, so I’m doing what I need to do to protect me and mine.”

  “Okay,” said Rachael, keeping her voice calm, “I agree with you. The world is really scary out there. It’s terrifying. But, come on . . . you have to at least take a chance for some peaceful way for us all to survive. I don’t know who you are, I don’t know your friends, or what any of you have done, but you can start over. Don’t you want that? We’re already at war with the world out there. Don’t you want a chance for something better?”

  A clatter of something sliding across the tiles on the second floor echoed like a gunshot. Mark flinched, and his gun went off. Rachael cried out as a bullet grazed her shoulder, hissing as white-hot agony seemed to ignite in her skin.

  “That’s just a taste, bitch,” Mark yelled. “Unless you want more you’d—”