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“234… 235… 236…”
There was a dull cry, followed by a long and slow dragging noise. A guttural moan echoed against the wooden paneling of the hallway.
Sarah closed her eyes tightly, biting back a rush of hot tears that stung at her eyes, and whispered, “Zero.”
Scrape. Silence. Scrape. Silence. The staggered walking traveled down the hallway until finally it reached what she was fairly certain was the door.
Her breath caught in her throat, and she waited, wishing for silence.
After a few moments, she released a long sigh of air. Listening to the gentle thudding of her heart, she began to count.
“1… 2… 3…”
***
It had been at least a day; a day since warning sirens had erupted in her neighborhood and chaos had overtaken the sunny suburban landscape. Everywhere, people had piled hastily stuffed bags into the trunks of cars while screaming children stood by clutching family cats. Sarah had been loading her own car when the neighbor’s three-year-old was snatched up, screeching tomcat and all, and bitten through the neck by one of the crawlers.
That was when chaos had become terror. Every car made for the road simultaneously, as the monsters emerged from the trees on all sides, and the road became a snarl of collisions and twisted metal. Looking at the mess helplessly, Sarah turned and fled from the carnage at the neighbors’, which had spread from the three-year-old to include the parents who’d come to her valiantly pointless defense. The crawlers were distracted with squabbling over the dead family’s parts, and it gave her time to get inside.
She’d seen footage of them breaking down doors to reach all the obvious places. Some part of the crawler brain still understood where a human would try to hide if someone were coming to dine on them. News programs had advised the only good hiding place was one they would not expect. Sarah had only one idea: a crawl space beneath the downstairs hallway that she’d squirmed through to install cable wiring. Taking refuge inside it, she’d tried not to listen as the crawlers did their work in the rest of the neighborhood.
But the screaming was too loud.
***
Her plan had been to wait—to wait for them to finish up their eating and move on, leaving behind another pocket of devastation. Whenever she had just about decided to push up the floorboards and see, she’d hear them: dragging their feet across her floorboards.
Her nerves were frayed and shot. Sarah no longer trusted her own instincts to tell her when it was safe to go. But she couldn’t stay in the dark forever. She didn’t have any food or water, and she didn’t trust that there might not be things in the crawl space that were just as deadly. Immediately, she began to catalogue all of the poisonous spiders in California. Brown recluse? She was done for. Black widow? Treatable, but only if you could actually get to a hospital. The thought of them was enough to make her nearly bolt, crawlers or no.
So she had devised a system: she would count a thousand heartbeats. If nothing interrupted, that would signal her moment of escape.
So far, she had not made it past three hundred.
***
Her mouth was sticky, and though it was oppressively hot, she didn’t sweat: dehydration was starting. At some point, she would have to leave. It might have been death out there, but it would be death down here as well. At least above ground she had a fighting chance.
But leaving posed an additional threat: undeath. Being attacked by a crawler didn’t necessarily mean dying. Certainly, if they devoured you completely, there was nothing left to keep going. But their bite made you one of them, and she’d seen videos of half-men dragging themselves by their fingernails across deserted streets, screaming at news cameras in hunger.
No, better to die alone in the dark, Sarah decided, than become one of them. If she couldn’t reach one-thousand, she would stay below and accept her fate. She continued counting.
“145… 146… 147…”
***
She’d been close. She’d almost reached nine-hundred, and then there had been a tortured cry — not human, some unlucky animal — and she’d had to start again. Still, there had been nothing inside the house since the last cycle. Perhaps that was enough.
It was foolish to stay down here, her mind screamed, to just let herself die. Another part of her recalled the threat of undeath, but then a strange question called up in her mind: was it really so much worse than death?
The thought settled heavily in her heart. Sarah did not believe in the after-life, and so for her, death was the end, an infinite void. If she could not get away, if the crawlers caught her, if they made her one of them, was that really worse than the Nothing of death?
She knew the thought was perverse — worse, even — but she couldn’t shake it. More and more, she just wanted to get out. She wasn’t even counting heartbeats anymore. She was just listening, and contemplating, struggling against bolting from pure impulse.
***
Time crawled slowly. She was dimly aware that at least two days had passed.
“I can’t just let myself die down here,” she whispered, starting to cry but finding she didn’t have enough water left in her body to produce tears. Her heart raced as panic set in.
She pictured herself kicking up the floorboards and bolting from the house, evading crawlers and running all the way to a safe zone, where steel walls and guns would keep the monsters at bay. Then she pictured something very different: herself, with moldering skin, staggering, moaning, crawling from city to city, devouring.
A sense of profound calm settled over her; chased by purpose.
Without another moment’s hesitation, she pushed up at the loose floorboards, and stood, facing whatever lay waiting beyond.
Lindsay Morgan Lockhart has the rare fortune of making her way in life filling virtual worlds with stories, but it has not subdued her raging desire to put her own stories to the page as well. Her fiction can be found cluttering like cobwebs throughout the internet.
This story is sponsored by
Debi Blood — What dark secrets is your iguana keeping from you? The Glendale Witch.
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15 Responses to “COUNT TO A THOUSAND • by Lindsay Morgan Lockhart”
Comments
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October 30th, 2011 at 3:45 am
Scared me!
October 30th, 2011 at 7:18 am
Oooohhhhh, I like this a lot! It’s the same hypothetical battle I fight with myself every time I watch a zombie movie: Is it better to end it yourself, or become one of “them”?
October 30th, 2011 at 7:27 am
Thumpity-thumpity-thump-thump..thump….thump. Whew, now I’ve finally stopped thinking about what I just read, my heart is finally calming down.
Stuck in a crawlspace with the possibility of known crawly critters waiting to bite vs going out in the open where known crawly critters will bite. Some choice. Great story, perfect for Halloween. Thought of Zombies (of course) but then let my mind wander to more “wormy” kinds of things, with stubby legs of course. Wish there had been a picture included in this story. Maybe an EDF innovation for the future.
Ah well, hope I don’t have nightmares tonight. A big four star read for me…. Thumpity…thumpity, thumpity.
October 30th, 2011 at 7:45 am
I keep saying I don’t like zombie stories and keep getting proven wrong. Very well done! Five stars.
October 30th, 2011 at 8:47 am
Scary!
October 30th, 2011 at 9:40 am
Lots of anticiaption and lots of atmosphere in this well-told flash fiction story. I really like the counting – it helps to build up to a heart-stopping crescendo. Well done. I loved it.
October 30th, 2011 at 10:19 am
a good meditation on a trapped situation.
Not my kind of story, but well-written.
entertaining
October 30th, 2011 at 10:31 am
One of the best get-to-the-door stories I’ve read. Even beats THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM in its mature originality.
October 30th, 2011 at 5:38 pm
Personally I am not a big fan of the “get-to-the-door” story, but this would definitely work as a strong opening for a longer work set in this post-apocalyptic world.
I like the idea that we are/would be learning about the “rules” of the new world along with the MC, a la 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead.
And on a completely unrelated note, Lindsay, your Twitter name cracks me up.
October 30th, 2011 at 10:50 pm
Sometimes I start reading a story and right away begin to edit it in my head. So much unrealistic business, so many plot holes. Focusing on the biggest difficulty for me: It says in the story that once the monster crawlers were done eating everybody in a place they would move on to the next place. The impression I got from the first scene was that the creatures were voracious and would eat their victims on the spot. Then why did they keep coming back into her house? And who were they eating? No one left in the house except her, presumably. Amd since they were that voracious, and since they had probably gotten most of the people in the first attack, it seems as though they would have moved on to the next place where there would be far more easier pickings than the stray human hiding here and there. The story does wrk to a certain extent in that Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Night Of The Living Dead sort of way. But there you see the better way of handling material like this, the human adaptability factor. Had we been told that the girl was making plans to sneak out and provision herself and then return to her hiding place, the reader would have been more invested in her fate. To simply send her out like that makes me lose trust in the author.
October 31st, 2011 at 12:43 am
FL, if you do want to entertain yourself with thinking through the logistics, ecology, epidemiology etc. of these things, there are people out there who’ve thought through some of this, which you could google. A while back somebody analysed the vampire ecology of the Buffyverse, and found it was sustainable.
In general, if you want a monster ecology that would wipe out everybody human, you need a kind of monster that can keep going on second best prey that doesn’t die out. For instance, newly introduced rats can wipe out island birds by eating their eggs, but only because rats can eat other things. Without that, you would get a cycle that allowed some of the birds to survive – because rats would die off whenever bird numbers dwindled, so reducing the predation.
October 31st, 2011 at 6:47 am
One of the most striking and classic elements of horror is isolation.
To pull us away from the security of our fellow kind — from that mutual confirmation of what is real, from the hope of recovering this life so brutally rent from our hands — is to leave us at the mercy of our own minds.
You feed us our fears: the unseen of the dark; the cramped and claustrophobic; the tickle on your neck as your body rocks with each count of a living heart; the unknown of what is beyond death or even a simple door; and we subsist in isolation.
I would say that this is not a zombie story, though it is a story that has zombie-like creatures in it. No, this is a story of the isolated and the unknown.
Well done!
October 31st, 2011 at 8:28 am
@11, I did think that bit through, okay a rogue monster crawler stay behind to finish off the humans that are hiding. However she hears them being devoured in her house. Why her house? Are they all hiding in there? It’s possible the monster crawlers are dragging the bodies from another house into her house to eat them but that plays against the voracious on-the-spot eater from the first scene.
And that was just one problem I had with the story. There were many others that I saw.
@12, that to me is the most effective part of this story. And that’s why it was disappointing to me that the author makes this girl almost as mindless as her monster crawlers. The most she can think to do is count to a thousand. Wait them out. She doesn’t plan beyond that — sneak out, provision herself, get back in her hiding place. The resilience and strength of human beings to survive makes these stories work. Instead this author puts her out there to be eaten.
October 31st, 2011 at 9:13 am
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November 4th, 2011 at 6:11 pm
I loved this story. The line “So far, she had not made it past three-hundred” really struck me. I don’t case as much about the technicalities of the monsters– nice and creepy and entertaining.