Portland, Oregon

Yesterday

5:30 AM

Steve

The Jumpin’ Bean cafe wasn’t due to open for another thirty minutes, but Steve suspected it would be a busy morning. Foot traffic outside the store had been crazy for at least the last fifteen minutes. Usually it was just a few people out for a jog along the quiet Portland streets before they filled up with traffic. There had been a lot of cars out too, well ahead of the normal traffic and rush-hour, most of them speeding. Steve had just shaken his head when several cars had blown by the cafe fast enough to rattle the windows. The joggers seemed especially amped up as well, all of them sprinting past the cafe almost too fast for Steve to see.

“Sweetie?” Something going on today?” Steve called over his shoulder. Jenn poked her head out from the small backroom that served as their bakery. Her face already smudged with errant traces of flour.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Like anything. Lots of people out there,” Steve said and then saw two more people flee past the cafe. He was about to tell his wife that the joggers seemed especially hyped about something, but then saw that the people running were both in their pajamas. “What the hell?”

“Something up?” Jenn asked from the backroom.

There was a thump as somebody threw themselves at the window of the cafe. Steve shouted as they smeared the window with blood, the thick red fluid spilling from a number of small wounds across their arms and hands.

“Jesus!” Steve said. The man on the other side of the glass, a 40-something dressed in a torn and bloody suit, thumped his head against the window.

“Oh my god!” Jenn said as she emerged from the backroom.

“Call 911!” Steve said as he approached the door of the cafe to unlock it and let the man in. He had his hand on the knob when somebody else lunged at the man and tackled him to the ground. Steve and Jenn both screamed and backed away behind the counter. A woman, just over five feet tall but bulging with muscle, crouched over the man the way a lion would an antelope. Her muscles tore her clothes and her skin was a twitching mass of thick veins. She let out bestial roar and buried her face in the man’s neck. He screamed as blood shot out of the newly torn hole along the front of his throat. Red neck muscles and sinew were exposed, but only for a minute. His blood jetted onto the window and closed a red curtain on the gruesome display.

“What the hell? What the hell?” Jenn said. Her voice trembled and wavered liked a warped record. Steve continued to stumble backward, unable to look away from the scene outside. Beyond the thick, syrupy splatter of blood on the glass, the street became more chaotic by the second. A car slammed into a building across the street, and sent its unbuckled driver through the window and into the stone facade. The driver’s neck snapped and Steve retched as he saw their brains scatter out of their head like pie filling.

More cars careened past, more people sprinted through the street until the trickle became a mob and the sound of feet hitting the pavement drowned out the roar of cars. Many of the people in the street displayed over-sized muscles and veins, and all of them had eyes blacker than tar.

“Back entrance!” Steven shouted and spun. The woman who had torn the neck out the business man rose up from behind the wide smear of blood and stared at Steve and his wife with eyes that leaker darkness. She reared her fists back and cracked the window. “Go! Go!”

Jenn ran through the backroom to the fire exit. Steve slammed the door shut and tipped a shelf full of baking ingredients in front of the door, and followed his wife. He grabbed a heavy rolling pin on his way, and was relieved to see that Jenn had grabbed a mop to defend herself with.

“Hurry!” she said and waved him through the fire exit. He slammed it behind him as as the sound of breaking glass filled the front of the store. He and Jenn had emerged in a narrow alley, fire escapes above them, the street on either side. Both ends of the alley were a rush of humanity and cars. For the first time, Steve heard the distant sounds of sirens, and the echoing booms of what could only be explosions.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“We’ve gotta get out of here!” Jenn said.

“Our apartment is——”

Ten blocks through that,” Jenn said and pointed. A group of unnaturally coordinated people with green eyes swarmed over another group of people trying to climb over a pair of wrecked cars and proceeded to maim them with disturbing efficiency. They snapped necks like professional assassins, and a few of them managed to punch through the skulls of the people unlucky enough to be caught.

“Holy shit,” Steve said.

“There that bar being renovated near here, one block over. The owner comes by for coffee sometimes, gripes about the construction taking forever,” Jenn said.

“So?”

“So it has metal shutters on the window, and it’s off street level,” Jen said. “We get there quick as we can and wait for the National Guard to show up and solve whatever the hell this is.”

“Fine!” Steve said. He didn’t have any better ideas. He was tempted to just duck back into the backroom of the cafe, but that mad woman was already banging through the door. It was only wood, and it sounded as if she was already breaking her way through it.

Jenn hurried down the alleyway, mop clutched in front of her, and Steve ran behind her. When they came to the end (opposite the side where the green-eyed people had slaughtered at least a dozen pedestrians), Jenn peeked around one corner while Steve checked the other.

The far end of the street was a mass of tangled vehicles belching smoke into the air. Flames within the cars licked at the silhouettes of charred bodies. Steve barely noticed them. Instead he stared at something like a spider crossed with a water tower. Its “head,” for lack of a better word, was crowned by a series of large glowing orbs that twitched like eyes. As soon as Steve saw it, one of the eyes focused on him.

His head was filled with an intense, metallic droning as if his skull had become home to robotic wasps. It wasn’t a sound in his ears to much as in his brain itself, the focus intensifying more and more until he thought his head would explode——

And it stopped. He gasped and looked up to see three inhuman creatures leaping at the spider-tower. The creatures barely looked human, as their bodies were stretched out and torn, their eyes huge and black, and everywhere black thorns sprouted from beneath their skin and muscles. They lashed at the spider-tower with vicious talons and gaping maws and barbed tongues.

A mob of green-eyed people all screamed as one as the spider-tower wavered and tipped over. The green-eyed people wailed mindlessly, but then surged toward the creatures, attacking them like an army of ants felling spiders. A mob of people with black eyes charged in and the two groups began literally tearing each other apart. And none of them were looking toward Steve and Jenn.

“C’mon, c’mon!” Steve said and ran across the street with his wife. She kept her head down and hurried alongside until they were across and behind a delivery truck.

“What are those things?” Jenn panted. Steve could only shake his head.

There was an explosion above them, and Steve muffled a scream as a passenger airliner was cut in two just overhead. Black specks, passengers, tumbled out of the bisected aircraft like so much pepper out of a shaker. There was no sign of what had destroyed the plane.

Jenn wailed beside him as they both looked past it and the hundreds of people falling to their dooms and the blue sky beyond. The moon was just visible, pale and blue, and missing a huge chunk out of its side. Debris floated lazily away from the moon, a slow motion surrealistic horror show of something impossible. Steve’s brain couldn’t take it. It was all too much. It felt like hours, but it hadn’t even been ten minutes. Ten minutes.

Ten minutes and the world had just gone utterly batshit.

Something yanked at him and he screamed in panic, only to see Jenn pulling him away from the street, down another alley. He couldn’t think, he could barely walk. He followed his wife away from the insanity that the world had become.

Portland, Oregon

Now

“…then Jenn pulled me the rest of the way to here. It took us a while to go up the block without being seen. Helicopters crashed nearby, and some giant skinless dog thing almost ate Jenn. One of those spider-tower creatures killed it, impaled it with one of its legs, and moved on after a horde of those black-eyed people. We only survived because all the monsters were more interested in each other than us.

“The door here was open when we arrived. I assume because the owner was here early like he usually is, came out to see what was going on, and either ran away or got…swept up in everything,” Steve said.

“I crashed our car halfway up the block, ran down here and banged on the door,” Gregg said.

“And I wasn’t far behind. Saw the street ahead was blocked off, so I pulled over and tried every door I could until I came to this one. Gregg’s wife was peeking out through the bottom of one of the shutters and let me in. Thank god for that,” Laura said.

“And this was all yesterday morning?” Wil asked.

“I came in a little before eight,” Laura said. “After that we hunkered down, kept the shutters closed, didn’t make a peep. It sounded like hell out there for about four or five hours. Thought I’d go crazy listening to it.”

“It’s never really gotten quiet,” Tyson said. The teenager had been silent through the different stories and Wil had almost forgotten he existed. “There’s always something: a roar, an explosion, somebody screaming.”

“I know we’re not the only ones holed up, but we’ve stayed safe this long. Maybe it’ll be okay until help comes,” Kelly said.

“Help ain’t coming,” Gregg said. “It’s still the same out there, just quieter.”

“It might,” Kelly said.

“We didn’t see any signs of help,” Matsuda said.

“The help probably needs some help,” Qadira said and snorted.

“We only got here because those things were fighting each other too. We wouldn’t even have made it to you if we hadn’t gotten in the middle of a brawl between the black-eyed zombies and the green-eyed things,” Wil said.

“So maybe they’ll take each other out?” Tyson asked.

“Seems like a long shot. And there’s still other things to worry about out there,” Matsuda said. He recounted the presence of the distortions in the woods and the outskirts of the city, as well as whatever had been swimming in the Willamette.

“There was something else too. I saw it right before that bug thing showed up. It looked like some kind of weird vines were growing over the road and a bunch of the buildings nearby. I didn’t get a look at it, but it definitely wasn’t normal,” Wil said.

“Yeah. I saw that too,” Qadira said.

“Christ,” Gregg muttered. Kelly held her son close to her and cried silently.

“Well it’s quieted down from yesterday,” Laura said. “And you all made it this far. Moving around isn’t impossible. And while the wilderness isn’t as safe as I was hoping, it’s a far sight better than being stuck in the city.”

“Going out there is suicide,” Steve said. “We barely made it a single block. Hell, they almost died right around the corner. They would have if we hadn’t let them in!”

“You got any food in here? Water?” Matsuda asked.

“Some snacks behind the counter,” Tyson said.

“Nothing to drink but booze. There was a big bottle of water here yesterday but we drank through that this morning,” Laura said.

“Then you got a couple days, maybe four, tops,” Matsuda said.

“Hold on just a second. You have food and water. I can see it in your packs!” Gregg said.

“We’ll leave you some,” Matsuda said.

“Some?” Gregg said. Kelly put a dainty hand on his shoulder and he shrugged it off. “If you’re going back out there you should give all of it away. You won’t need it. You’ll be dead before you need any!”

“As Laura pointed out, we’ve made it this far,” Matsuda said.

“Why are you in such a rush to go back out? This guy wants to find his girlfriend, but what is she to you? Why do you give a shit, huh?” Gregg demanded and stepped closer.

“Because I want to find out what happens on my way out of the city. Whatever caused all this, whatever is happening, we’ll never survive it if we don’t understand it. Right now everything is chaos. The greatest weapon in any war is always information. We have almost none right now. But just today I’ve learned enough to have made the trip worth it,” Matsuda said.

“Like what?” Steve asked.

“That these creatures aren’t united. They fight and kill each other as much as they do us. The black and green-eyed ones seem to hold a particular animosity for each other as well. The random creatures we’ve seen, without black or green eyes, don’t appear to be anything more than beasts. Fearsome and lethal, true, but of only base animal intelligence,” Matsuda said.

“The green-eyed things are stronger when there’s more of them,” Wil said. “And when they’re near those spider-towers, they get even moreso. I think…I think I saw them using some kinda telekinesis when they were fighting near Gutierrez’s house.”

“Tele-what?” Gregg asked.

“Mind powers,” Steve said. Gregg snorted and shook his head.

“Gimme a break,” he said.

“Is it any stranger than anything else that’s happened since yesterday morning?” Laura asked. Gregg didn’t answer.

“These shutters open?” Matsuda asked.

“Yeah. I had them open just a crack to keep watch when I saw you all,” Laura said.

“Then we’ll drop some food and water, take a peek, and if it’s clear, we go,” Matsuda said.

“What’s the rush? Can’t we take a few minutes?” Qadira asked.

“You can stay as long as you like. But one minute is as good as the next out there. We should keep moving as long as the immediate area is clear and we’ve got the energy. Staying here is…” Matsuda trailed off as he studied the people huddling in the dark. “Well, it might work for some.”

“Fuck you,” Gregg said. Matsuda didn’t respond. Wil started to say something when there was a thud from outside. Something bumped heavily against the side of the building, on the left side of the wall with the shuttered windows. Then another thud, and another, and another, the sounds making their way across the outer wall.

Footsteps, Wil thought. The thuds were heavy but not very forceful, just the measured steps of something huge and heavy walking along the side of the building. One of the windows cracked on the other side of the shutter, and the shutter itself wobbled in its frame and bent inward.

“Oh shit,” Steve whispered.

“It followed you here!” Gregg hissed. “You dumb shits! It followed you right to us!”

Wil thought of the huge bug creature, how it had been lurking up the side of the building and crawled its way down.

The metal shutter bent in more with a metallic creak and a pop. Matsuda drew his rifle.

“Oh shit,” Wil said and licked his lips as he took out his pistol, and readied himself for another nightmare for what felt like the millionth time since yesterday morning.