The Last 100 - Ch.6

I closed the chat and scrambled to the security desk, calling Wilhelm to me as I did so. I hunched over the monitors and stared at them. Nothing. The parking lot out the front of the observatory was deathly quiet. I looked at it with scrutiny, casting a watchful gaze over it as if every misplaced piece of gravel was a monster waiting in disguise for me.

When they did eventually arrive it was without fanfare of great numbers. It happened with a flash of grey flesh dancing out and then back into the woods. A tentative step that emboldened the others that hid within the tree line. Finally, approximately an hour after the bell had been sounded the entire tree line at the edge of the car park was vibrating with a wave of grey flesh. They danced out of the trees, ran to the gutter that separated the paved car park form the grassy hill on which the trees grew. Once there they would either howl and run back to the tree line or skip the howling step.

I rested my hand anxiously upon Wilhelm’s back, I felt the tension in his muscles and the low vibrations that ran through him as he let out a low growl. From the bond between us I could feel his tension. His fear and how he bayed for the blood of these creatures. I reassured him as best I could with my sloppy attempts at telepathy.

I saw the number of notifications in chat slowly pile up, the frequency at which they arrived reaching a fever pitch. I didn’t check them however, my eyes were glued to the screen, held captive, unable to move my body from the small televisions as if I was a spectator in my own life.

Is this what it means to be paralysed by fear? I thought. It was an eerie thing to watch, the mics didn’t have sound so all I heard was the occasional muffled howl though the boarded doors, and yet watched as a horde of small, humanoid figures of grey ran at and were deterred by the car park. They seemed to be afraid of the asphalt.

It was with a coordinated suddenness that they stopped this however, they all retreated back to the tree line and I heard an utterly monstrous sound. Emerging from the tree line was a beast, twice the size of the figures which it resembled, in its hand it clutched a tree branch, ripped off an unfortunate gum tree.

I watched as the larger creature swatted several others around it that answered its roar with one of their own. A challenge I assumed, he was asserting his dominance. From there I watched with fearful reverence as the creature paced toward the carpark. Watched as he stood before the black mass that was the paved surface. Watched as he scrunched up his eyes and held tight to his courage and shockingly placed a foot down on the foreign surface. He opened his eyes and from the cameras I could see the look of utter surprise that was plastered across his features. For several seconds all was silent. Returning back to the silence that I had known for the past two days.

Then the large beast roared. With him to did all of the other creatures in the tree line, I heard the cacophony that was their raised voices and watched with dead eyes as they charged across the grass and then across the pavement that had deterred them for the past hour.

When they slammed into the doors they rattled dangerously, the planks I had placed bowing with the force and even cracking in some places. There were at least fifty of the creatures of there. They hammered against the glass, shattering it and then poked arms through the gaps in the planks, clawing at both the wood and the door frames.

What did I do as this raged on around me you ask? Well I was frozen, stuck, rooted in my position tied down with the ropes of fear, my mind? A mess with self-defeating thoughts. What the fuck was I thinking, I hadn’t made anything safe, all I had done was entomb myself here. The blocked doors and windows didn’t keep them out, they kept me in.

A screeching, different to the battle howls of before was what eventually tore me away from my monologue. I looked to the source of the noise to find Wilhelm mauling one of the outstretched arms of the beats. It howled in pain and pulled its mangled arm back out of the doorway. Wilhelm then moved onto the next arm, he was systematic in his destruction, biting just enough to get them to retreat and yet not take up too much time.

The sadness and despair that had consumed me up until a few moments ago was gone, in its stead was a pure, black rage. One which I don’t think I had ever felt before I gripped the axe that rested beside me on the counter so hard that the skin on my knuckles seemed to be about to split open.

I vaulted the security desk, yelling incoherently and charged toward the closest of the four front doors, driving my axe down with all the force of my body into an overhead strike into the arms of one of the creatures. I felt the metal bite into bone as the shock of the hit reverberated up the length of my arm. The beast howled, and I laughed at its pain. I didn’t know I had a side like this, one of darkness and rage. I hefted the axe above my head and brought it down on the grey, scaly elbow of another creature. One more hit, one more nail.

Me and Wilhelm worked like that for a time he took the right most two doors and I covered the ones on the left, we attacked the arms as they grasped threw and clawed at the wooden barricade, as they pushed it to the point of near buckling with their combined weight.

I was at the farthest door to the left side, severing the grey hand of a beast from its arms when the planks exploded outward in a hail of splinters and grey flesh. The large one had returned. He came through the breach shoulder first, his residual momentum carrying him into me and sending both of us sprawling onto the ground.

He reacted faster than I and stood, hefting the branch of gum tree above his head in wind up to club my torso. Wilhelm catapulted into him in a storm of fur, claw and fury. Tearing at the larger animal with such a ferocity that it stumbled back. As he went in for the kill, his jaws about to enclose on the beasts neck a scaly grey foot collided with the side of his head, sending him back into the room, sliding across the tiles. I scrambled forward my grip on the axe had turned into a choke hold, my hand holding it right below the head and I punched the blade into the smaller creature’s face, smiling with viscous delight at the feeling of his nose bridge collapsing and the shards of bone being force up into its brain. I turned to the other creatures. A wicked smile on my face, to find the larger beast rising form his previously stunned form. He looked at me with pure fury and roared again. His men surged through the breach. My smile dropped

I turned to the barking of Wilhelm to find him at the beginning of the side corridor that led to the outside of the observatory. To the only doors I hadn’t blocked. I smiled at the dog and chased after him as he ran down the hall, slamming into the glass doors shoulder first, exploding into the cold, night air in a storm of glass and minor lacerations.

I heard the frenzied foot falls of the beats behind us, I ran to the edge of the cliff that rounded of the back half of the hill on which the observatory stood. Down below was the surging river that the town had been built around. I had seen enough movies to know what was next.

“Fuck me.” I turned back to see the horde of grey lizard like men surging out of the broken open door, they would be on us in seconds. I grabbed Wilhelm and clutched him tightly to my body.

For better or for worse.

We jumped.