The Remaining: Faith by D. J. Molles

Author:D. J. Molles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-05-26T22:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Haley screamed.

It was only a short sound—she choked it off as soon as it left her mouth.

The thing at the door snapped his head toward them, somehow immediately able to triangulate on the sound he had just heard. He stared into the darkness for a moment and Clyde knew that they were no longer hidden.

The thing let out an ungodly noise, incredibly loud in the cramped space of the convenience store. The face, blank and drunken before, was now twisted into wide-eyed rage, and he launched himself at them. The crossbar in the door stayed him, the entire door rattling in its frame.

Haley bolted upright and backpedaled into the wall of cigarettes behind her. Boxes of Marlboros and Newports tumbled down over her shoulders as her hands spastically grabbed about, like she was searching for a doorknob that might open up the wall and allow her to escape.

Clyde tried to speak, but nothing came out of him.

Something in that scream—the primal hunger of it—had ripped every shred of courage out of him. He stood now, panicked and thoughtless in the path of an imminent attack, his mental condition fading to black as his brain pumped overloads of chemicals into him that his body had no idea how to work through.

Adrenaline and noradrenaline shot through his bloodstream. His veins and capillaries constricted, sending his blood pressure skyrocketing. His heart rate and respiration slammed his chest. His eyes dilated, his corneas warping and causing everything outside of the two degrees directly in front of his face to look speckled black. All high-road thought left him. All complicated notions of courage and protective instincts suddenly evaporated into nothingness. Haley was no longer a concept that he was aware of. The only thing his animal brain could comprehend was his own death and survival.

Clyde sank behind the counter again—perhaps because he wanted to hide, or perhaps because his knees were giving out. He never registered when Haley ran around him, trying to escape by running out the back of the store. His eyes remained affixed on the creature in front of them as he pulled himself through the door, over the crossbar.

Jags of glass were still embedded in the weather stripping. They ripped open the man-thing’s midsection as he heaved himself into the convenience store, and when he landed in the sea of glass inside, things began to flop out of his gaping stomach, coils of his own guts caught on the glass of the crossbar.

But he did not seem to notice that it was tethered to the door by its own entrails. He stumbled to his feet, his hands sparkling with the chunks of glass still poking out of his skin. The pail rope of his gut came loose of the doorframe and plopped down onto the ground. He kept moving to the back of the store, trailing his own intestines. He did not look at Clyde.

Clyde found himself curled up behind the counter, no longer upright enough to see over the top. He closed his eyes.

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